


Heathens

by Calebski



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Azkaban, Death Eater Focus, F/M, Hurt and Suffering, Major character death - Freeform, Post War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-09
Updated: 2019-02-09
Packaged: 2019-10-25 05:51:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 45,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17719331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calebski/pseuds/Calebski
Summary: Hermione's head tilted back as she stared up at the imposing grey prism that dominated the bleak skyline. The raging wind lashed against her thin robes, the unending gusts finding their way through the fabric to nip at her skin. She felt nothing.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic started life as a one shot I posted last Halloween, the original story has been re-edited and expanded as I wanted to do a little more with these characters, and with Evander and Hermione in particular. 
> 
> Fan casts: Evander Avery (Avery Jr) - Colin Morgan / Thorfinn Rowle - Alexander Skarsgard / Rabastan Lestrange - Colin O’Donoghue / Ade Selwyn - Donald Glover.
> 
> Special hugs to the unbelievably talented jheeley, who gave such lovely feedback when this was first posted as a one shot, which started the idea of this expansion.

Hermione’s head tilted back as she stared up at the imposing grey prism that dominated the bleak skyline. The raging wind lashed against her thin robes, the unending gusts finding their way through the fabric to nip at her skin.

She felt nothing.

She was numb, physically, mentally and emotionally. She was existing now, alive but no longer present. Hermione felt like she was in suspended animation, held in a blank state while she waited for the reality of the last few months to hit. Sometimes she wondered if it ever would. Sometimes she wondered if that would be the moment that finally broke her.

Pulled from her quiet observations of the desolate landscape by an aggressive tug on her arm, Hermione immediately moved in compliance with the guards shepherding, without question or hesitation. There was no delaying the inevitable. Over the last few months, no one would have recognised this Hermione Granger. She had seen it on their faces, the surprise that she did not fight back, she had no angry words of protest, there was simply no fight left in her. Compliance did not help the treatment she received, but in any case, there was no sense in dawdling, there was no procrastination time left for her.

Hermione hadn't been sure what to expect from the inside of the prison walls, but somehow what she found was worse than she had envisioned. The muted greyness that had swamped her vision on the outside of the rock was magnified here. It was darker than she could ever have imagined, and colder, so much colder, she had barely made it over the threshold before she could swear she sensed the ingrained damp from the floors running unhindered up her legs.

The sober man at her side directed her, roughly, to a desk just inside the entry, manned by a woman with a mean looking face and flaxen hair that was pulled into a severe looking high ponytail. She regarded Hermione with a slight quirk of her lips that didn’t meet her hard eyes. The guard gave her name to the witch, unnecessarily, everyone knew who she was. Hermione realised that this man hadn’t been one of the ones that had guarded her before, she hadn’t looked up to see his face, the realisation coming from his uttering of the first words he had spoken since collecting her. He had spat her name, the syllables dripping with accusation and scorn, and the mean looking witch smiled wider.

Hermione was ushered behind a curtain to her right, thin grey fabric stretched over a concertina wire frame reminding her of visits to the Muggle doctor when she was little. She was commanded to strip in harsh tones and Hermione, having experienced processing before now, didn't so much as blink in protest as the woman made no move to leave; she hadn't expected her to. Her belongings were taken from her, what little things she had left, nothing of particular consequence. She wondered as she moved what had happened to her things, had they all been destroyed?

Under the watchful eyes of the woman, Hermione sacrificed one unflattering set of robes, for another, thinner set, and then moved back from around the curtain ready, or not, for what was to come next.

* * *

As the little lift chugged up the dingy shaft, Hermione focused on the sounds it made, the clanging of rusty metal against stone, the chaffing sound of the guards too-tight uniform as he stretched forward to begin writing up his report. She should be scared she thought blankly, Hermione Granger, a member of the Golden Trio and Hogwarts prefect, would have been afraid. But she wasn't, whoever she was now. Not because the situation wasn't dire, it very much was, not because she had any hope of making it out of there alive, she didn’t, but still, she felt nothing.

What was there left to fear anymore?

When the lift came to a shuddering halt, Hermione placed a hand on the wall of the metal box to stop herself from toppling forward. She had never quite gained back the weight she had lost during that last year of the war, and she still struggled with her balance. Given her present circumstances, it didn't seem like she would ever look like herself again now.

Why should the outside revert to her time of innocence? The inside certainly had not.

As she once again got lost inside herself, the guard became impatient and gripped her upper arm, tight enough to bruise. Hermione didn't say anything; no reaction even crossed her features, she just followed alongside him trying to avoid the dampest patches of the floor, so as not to soak her standard issue canvas shoes.

No laces… that was... interesting.

Hermione kept her eyes forward as much as possible on the walk down the narrow corridor, though she detected flickers of movement in her peripheral vision on either side, from the inhabited cells. She could probably have named everyone in this wing on sight. She would certainly be recognised, or maybe she wouldn't be, she didn’t recognise the person in the mirror anymore.

When they reached the very end of the dank line, the guard muttered something under his breath, waving his wand around the bars, and they moved open slowly. He jostled her forward, and before she could move entirely away, he caught her wrist in a cruel grip, his fingers tightening to the point where he could have crushed the bone.

“I’m going to make your life miserable Granger,” he spat lowly before producing a metallic looking bangle from the inside of his jacket and forcing it onto her hand. As it fastened around her wrist, Hermione felt a stabbing sensation move straight from her arm, up into her core ripping a gasp from her throat. She instantly stilled, trying to suppress the clawing pain, panting to get her breath back.

The guard appeared angered by her lack of response and let go of her, not bothering to hide his complete revulsion before pushing her roughly away from him by her shoulder and slamming the bars shut.

Hermione quietly stepped over to the grey mattress that was lying in a darkened corner, and sat neatly, with her legs folded around herself. She shut her eyes until the humming from her centre adjusted then she let her head fall back against the war behind her and wished tears would fall.

* * *

‘The cold… Don’t make me go back there’.

The words she had heard Sirius call out in his sleep, so many years before, came back to Hermione that first night. At least she assumed it was night. There was only a small opening in the outer wall of the cell, no more than a couple of missing bricks, allowing her to see the sky, but the visage was so muted it was hard to tell what time it was.

Hermione had been walking back up to her room while staying at Grimmauld Place, over Christmas in their fifth year, and she had heard mumbling in the study. Hesitantly creeping forward she had spotted him, the last of his noble house, Sirius Black, sprawled inelegantly on a time ravaged sofa, it's once opulent fabric as tattered as the rest of the decaying house, more like a crypt than a habitable dwelling. Hermione had moved to stand next to him as his face contorted in pained expression after pained expression, as he unknowingly whimpered out his fears of being sent back to the place that had robbed him of himself.

Up until that moment, Hermione had wondered why Sirius had never made improvements to his childhood home, why he hadn't at least attempted to turn the place into something that would resemble a haven, she thought she understood now.

The dementors had tortured Sirius, hovering over him for twelve long years, they had stolen away his reason, his happiness, and his youth. They had played on his feelings of guilt for events that were out of his control. Hermione had swept his damp hair off his forehead as he had murmured apologies to James, Lily, and shared a whole host of other burdens into the night.

But Sirius, despite his imagined crimes, had been innocent.

They weren't here anymore. There were no more harbingers of pain lurking around the prism, hovering like vultures above a desert carcass. Hermione supposed she should feel grateful for their absence, but she could not. The cloaked figures would have made it quicker.

* * *

The bars to her cell opening made Hermione sit up; she wasn't sure of the last time she had moved, it could have been hours or even days, her perception of everything, including time, seemed to blur here. She had been tracking the progression of a small bug along the ceiling for a time, but she couldn't perceive how long ago that was now.

“Get up Granger,” the guard barked, and Hermione stepped to her feet and moved to the opening.

Once she was within his grasp, a white metal collar was fastened around her neck, tightened to the point of biting into her skin and made puffing in air difficult; Hermione said nothing. As she turned her head, a long pole was attached to the back of the choker-like restraint; it was then used as a handle of sorts to force her down the corridor. She had seen something similar used on dogs, or dangerous animals, she supposed that was what she was now.

Hermione idly wondered where they were heading for a moment, but then she recalled a conversation with Kingsley. She had sat before him in thin robes and dogged by the uncomfortable feeling that she was getting his room dirty just by being there. ‘Changes to Azkaban’ he had said, what he had gone on to explain was meaningless rhetoric, but there were some specifics, notably, showers and exercise.

The memory made Hermione stiffen momentarily, but it was brief enough that the guard didn't notice the minor pause. She tried to remember Kingsley’s words, but they weren't clear, not like his face, an ever moving transition between contempt and pity, eyes that judged, an image that had been clear even days later, even when it became one of the many faces that viewed her in the same way. Even after Hermione had seen so many people come down to gawk at her while she was still in the Ministry holding cells. His face remained. She could still remember how the now Minister for Magic gripped her, the night of the pretend Potters, as he secured her to the Thestral as they battled the forces of the dark high in the sky. She wondered if he regretted his sure grip now.

“Are you excited Granger?” The guard whispered into her ear, and Hermione dropped her face to the dirty floor, instinctively concentrating on her now tatty shoes. She had tried to keep them clean, a project she had given herself, but in that, like in all others that had gone before, she had failed.

“Today you get to meet your new friends, they have all been dying to meet you,” the guard continued, his voice was low and enthused with malicious glee.

Hermione didn't raise her face, and he jerked forward to grip her hair tightly, so tight that her eyes watered involuntarily.

“Always did think you were above everyone else, well, you’ll talk soon enough,” he threatened before he let go of Hermione’s hair and readjusted his grip on the pole at her neck. He pushed it forward before she was ready, making her feel as if the front of the collar would crush her windpipe before he increased his pace, forcing her the rest of the way at double speed.

When it seemed as if they had walked the entire length of the building, they came to a heavily vaulted door. The guard roughly detached the pole from the back of her neck, but the collar remained, it must have more magic suppressants than the bangle Hermione reasoned before the door was ripped open and she was pushed inside.

The room revealed was about ten times the size of the cell where she had spent her time so far, the walls were a muted cream, though it was apparent that the original colour was probably a white that had long since aged, judging by the peeling of the walls. Hermione blinked. Muted or not, it was the lightest colour she had seen for days maybe weeks, and her eyes took a little while to adjust.

The door behind her slammed shut, and she heard the clanking of several bolts followed by the dim pressure of wards being applied. Hermione moved away from the entrance and as she began to see more than the brightness she detected dark shapes that were almost clinging to the edges of the room, nine in total. The war, it seemed, dictated your behaviour wherever you were. Even thrown to hell Hermione had counted them without even being aware of it, she imagined their backs being placed to the wall had taken even less conscious thought.

Nine. The number rattled around her empty mind for a moment. Hermione wasn't sure if this was all who remained, or whether ten was the maximum capacity of the chamber. Or maybe these were the ones the guards wanted her thrown in with. It didn’t matter.

She was filled with the urge to retreat, to make herself smaller, old Hermione would have backed herself against a wall, but survival had been critical to that girl. Taking careful, measured steps she moved passed a rickety trolley with a few, sad looking books resting on top. Hermione grabbed the one closest to her hand and debated her next move. There were tables, three of them, but they were all on the other side of the room, where they were.

It wasn’t self-preservation that made Hermione attempt to keep her distance; those instincts had been long suppressed. It wasn’t even the expected taunting or probable violence. She had seen enough of the world to know that if they truly wanted to hurt her, it wouldn’t matter if she cowered. She had no means of defending herself, and there was no way the guards would intervene.

When it came to motivations for her actions now, Hermione simply had no desire to be anywhere near other human life. There were bars where she was kept now for a reason.

Instead, she made her way to the nearest wall and dropped down in front of it, to crouch on the floor; it was no cleaner than anywhere else in the decaying prism, but it did at least appear dry. As Hermione opened the book in her grasp she could feel all nine sets of eyes on her, but she didn't flinch, she was well used to eyes on her by now, eyes that held all emotions and intentions.

After a few tense moments had passed, the Death Eaters resumed whatever it was they had been doing before she arrived. Hermione wondered if they still thought of themselves under that moniker anymore. She occasionally spied them over the top of what she discovered was a compendium of poetry. A small cluster were around one table, conversing in low tones, while the rest were fanned out, standing either alone or in pairs.

In one of her quick eye darts, Hermione spotted Ade Selwyn standing alone, his shoulder blades pressed against the crumbling wall behind him. Mumbling to himself; his insufficient robes hanging off his diminished frame, exposing the gaunt lines of his neck and collarbone. Skin that had once looked like darkened caramel now looked sickly, and marbled, though it was his face where you could see the real extent of the degeneration that had begun to set in. Selwyn’s eyes were blank at first glance, like her’s, but now and then there was a gleam there that was maniacal, she could see twitching spasms by his right eye and trembles in his hand.

Hermione averted her eyes and tried to concentrate on the book, or at least give the appearance that she was doing so. She heard murmurs, her name being gritted out through clenched teeth, ‘Mudblood’ being excitedly whispered, but she kept looking down, counting in her head to one hundred and then turning a page to at least appear properly engaged.

A shadow fell over her sometime later, the darkness creeping up over her regrettably dirty shoes and crossed legs until the shade seeped into the parchment of her subterfuge prop. Hermione mentally comprised a list of the worst possible scenarios, another hangover from the war, before she looked up to meet the scrutinising gaze of Evander Avery.

His aristocratic head was tilted to the side, regarding her quizzically, there was no trace of fury or even disgust in his features, on the whole, he was calm, assessing. Despite their positions, him looming over her as he was, she felt no threat, at least not one that was immediate, and so Hermione waited, remaining still until he would make his move. She kept looking at him, not immediately averting her eyes, as had become her habit in the last few months. At first, it had been because it was difficult to watch the unfamiliar expressions on the faces of the people she loved, then because she realised her direct gaze made people uncomfortable. Somehow she had become feared. But not here, not in this room. Evander looked at her, but his face was wholly neutral. There was something freeing in that expression.

Hermione had never seen him this close before, their interactions during the war had been limited, nothing more than swirling robes and slight glimpses. She had heard him talked of though, the quiet Ravenclaw, a gifted boy in his day, solely focussed on academic pursuits, and one of the highest achieving students Hogwarts had ever seen, before her.

Hermione belatedly realised that she had read some of his poetry. There had been a set of verses framed on the fourth-floor corridor that she had found herself lost in one day. Professor Flitwick had found her, giving her a wan smile as he regarded her face almost pushed against the glass, he told her about him, how the professor lamented that they had lost Avery to the other side of the war.

_There is beauty where ever you seek to find it in this life_   
_Be it in the delicately carved handle of the knife in your back_   
_Or the mottled pattern of bruising against your skin_

“What are you doing here?” Evander asked after a time, his voice cool and crisp.

Hermione thought he sounded intelligent which was illogical; you couldn't detect acumen from such a sentence. It suited him, though, his voice, it matched the piercing nature of his eyes and the sharpness of his cheekbones, that was a perfect word for this one, sharp.

She held up her book, in lieu of any answer, though she knew that wasn't what he was referring to.

The dark matted hair that framed his face fell forward as he swept his gaze over her to the book, and back again as his lips broke into a soft smile.

* * *

Hermione laid back on the thin cot trying to shuffle into a position where it didn't feel like the bones of her back were pressing against the harsh floor. It was a futile effort. She tried to shut her eyes a few times but they just fell back open, sleep wouldn't come here. She could hear noises from the neighbouring cells, though only quiet shufflings, it was probable that it was still daytime. Nighttime, from what she had been able to discern so far, was much louder. Hermione hadn’t managed to get into the rhythm of the place yet, mainly as she wasn't trying.

As she had been straining to listen to the prisoners around her, Hermione detected a dripping sound, but couldn't ascertain whether it was from inside the cell or not; it could have been coming from anywhere; the rock was perpetually damp. Her skin felt endlessly misted, water seeming to coat her enough to leave droplets on her arms, beads that froze if they weren't wiped away.

‘Drip… drip… drip… drip… drip’

The consistency of the noise felt like beats against the side of her brain, the steadiness working her up and agitating her senses.

‘Drip… drip… drip… drip… drip’

It had been just like that, the blood, it dripped too. Hermione had never thought about it having a sound before, but it did.

‘Drip… drip… drip… drip… drip’

It was what it had sounded like as it had fallen from the bedside table onto the hardwood floor, pooling there, the only sound in their silent house. Hermione’s eyes had suddenly moved away from the mess she had made to observe the puddle forming, staining the floor.

Hermione threw a hand over her eyes to keep them shut. Remember… REMEMBER, she commanded herself, but she couldn't, it was only ever just flashes. When she was still at the Ministry, being held, she could piece together more, but the noises here interrupted her thoughts, she couldn't hang on to the impressions. She couldn’t even be certain what was real anymore. Though she knew the blood was, it had to have been. The after was a little clearer, but the before was a vague a nightmare of moving imagines and loud noises that went too fast and were hopelessly out of order.

Somewhere down the corridor, a guard must have been on patrol; they were never far away here, they liked them all to feel their presence, everything was a mind game. The war never really ended, the enemy just changed.

‘Thunk… thunk… thunk… thunk… thunk’

The repeated heavy footfalls grated her nerves, and Hermione tried again to block it all out, but it was too much.

‘Thunk… thunk… thunk… thunk… thunk’

Her heartbeat, it had been beating right out of her chest, so fast it had sounded like an accelerating train. It pounded in her ears so loud she couldn't think, couldn't catch a breath.

‘Thunk… thunk… thunk… thunk… thunk’

The pounding on the door, they were back, and she was there and Ron… he wasn't moving, why wasn’t he moving?

Hermione gripped the edges of her insubstantial robes in frustration, giving in and opening her eyes to stare impassively at the ceiling in defeat. The rats were back again; they were spelled away often, but it wasn't enough to dissuade what must have been an entire colony housed within the walls.

‘Scratch… scratch… scratch… scratch… scratch’

She could hear them scuttling across the floors, hear their tiny, clawed feet as they searched out their food. The vermin didn’t just exist here, they flourished.

‘Scratch… scratch… scratch… scratch… scratch’

Hermione had attacked her hands, her arms, everywhere, the blood, his blood was all over them, and it wasn't coming off, why wouldn't it come off?

‘Scratch… scratch… scratch… scratch… scratch’

She could remember then, that first set of robes, so stiff they made a noise when she moved, whenever she moved. So harsh they made her skin break out in rashes, pulling the blood to the surface, she didn't feel it.

Hermione reflectively smoothed her hands over her arms; she had deserved the rashes that had formed, like she deserved the solitude and the cold now.

She twisted onto her side and stared at the crumbling brick.

* * *

Evander was waiting at the back of the dirty room again, standing amongst his brothers. He had forgone the offering of books they left on the side, having already almost memorised every ill kept page. Shaking the tension from off his shoulders, he sat in his usual spot, at his usual table, and tried not to watch the door. She wasn't here yet, though there was no doubt she would be back, the guards had looked delighted when they had pushed her in the last time, what they anticipated the assembled would do, who knew?

Did they think any of the doomed men here were interested in exacting revenge, on someone who had been little more than a child during the war? Well, maybe some amongst them would, but then again, some of them weren't in charge of their faculties anymore. Anyone who had any of their cognitive processing ability remaining would have been able to recognise that the shell that was deposited in the room was not the same girl that had been fighting for so long.

For himself he harboured no desire to cause her harm, Evander was much more moved to study her. His eyes had regarded her almost desperately, ravenously taking in every tiny detail of her person and committing it to memory. The tightness of the collar they had pressed around her throat, how it made her breath rasp as she tried to draw in gulps of air and blow it back out without drawing attention to herself. How she had blinked when she entered, as if she was bathing in the moon's glow for the first time, how she averted her gaze at first, her eyes resting on the tips of her tiny feet.

_How strange, for you to be blinded by the light in a room filled with so much darkness._

He had watched her pick up the poetry book absently and slide down the wall, landing in a small, tidy heap on the floor. Evander wasn't the only one watching, they all were, there wasn't much in the way of ‘new’ around here. She was small, too skinny, and incredibly detached from the whole world around her. She should have been terrified walking into the room and yet he had detected no fear from her. Instead of cowering, Hermione Granger had turned the pages of the tattered book in front of her systemically, rhythmically, too blankly to be reading.

Her skin was so pale it was almost translucent, a beautiful sort of irony that he could almost see what lurked beneath her flesh as her eyes now gave away nothing. Her slim fingers were marred by cuts and dirt, but she held the book delicately, though not with a practised air, it was like muscle memory, her hands forming a familiar shape even though her brain did not give the command.

Awareness prickled along his cheek, and Evander turned his head slightly to meet the eyes of Thorfinn, the blonde was eyeing him knowingly, something close to amusement lingered in the corners, something he hadn’t seen on the man’s face for a long time. He didn’t acknowledge the accusation that look held, he met his eyes dead on, in silent challenge. Evander may have liked the man, more than any other he was entombed with in any case, but there were rules about how things were done between them, even in here. He was in no way attempting to keep his interest to himself.

He turned his head back around to glance at the door before resting his eyes back on the table surface.

What had she done to wind up here?

_In this now defunct game, the broken princess was left lying amongst the ashes._

Evander remembered when he was five or six, finding a bird in the gardens at the Manor while he had been out exploring. Its unusual colouring had stuck out in the crispness of the winter day. Bright, exotic blue plumes had sung against the snow that blanketed the ground. Its body was slumped, with one wing badly broken and Evander had lifted it gently into one hand, resolving to take it inside. His father had belittled his behaviour, aggressively taunting him for his bleeding heart and Evander hadn't bothered to enlighten him, rather, he let him believe whatever he wanted about his actions.

Despite his conduct, Evander hadn't expected the bird to live, he had spared no thought of nursing it back to health, or any other such nonsense. The mercy he had offered was simpler in intent. He couldn't have bared the idea of leaving a creature so beautiful to die in a place so harsh, so foreign to its existence.

_With my hand, I do not offer salvation, eternal life or peace, but hope, abstract and blissfully uncertain._

Evander had watched the girl with the glazed eyes, her once exuberant curls falling around her face like a shroud of withered feathers, and he had made the decision to speak to her. She had held up her book, offering what had, at first, seemed like a vacant answer to a probing question, until he had studied her, then his countenance changed, she had done as much as she could, probably more than she had for a long time.


	2. Chapter 2

Hermione had known it would come to this eventually. While she was widely numb to the world around her she was still aware; she still had a keen mind. It was a curse in a way, being less lucid would have been a blessing. She had seen the guards, sensed their simmering fury; it had started when she had first been brought into the holding cells at the Ministry, and she hadn’t expected anything different here.

Ron had been every bit as popular at Hogwarts as she was unpopular, and he had only become more esteemed afterwards. He always had time to stop for a drink after training with the guys, was always happy to share another tale of the ‘adventures of the Golden Trio’. Ron was affable, relatable, charismatic and for once out of their shadow.

What Hermione had done, whatever she had done, had taken away one of their own, the guards viewed her as the enemy and she couldn’t fault their assessment. So she knew she was going to have to pay. Though her lack of reaction wasn't affected, Hermione knew they wanted more from her, they needed her to suffer.

There were three of them that day when they came to take her on the weekly visit to the shower block; Hermione had eyed them slowly, moving her gaze from face to face. She saw it there, on the set of their jaws, in the tension in their shoulders. If only she could have given them what they wanted, maybe then this would never have had to happen. Then again she had never been one for pretence, even when her life was at stake, she had never been an actress, and right now she couldn't have screamed and begged if her life depended on it, which in a way, she supposed it already did.

When they made it into the outer room of the shower block, Hermione was roughly pushed down into a hard backed chair. She kept her gaze fixed straight ahead as the door was warded, kept it straight ahead as a rusted pair of scissors were produced, and kept it straight ahead as the long strands of her once vibrant curls fell to her feet.

Hermione recalled the story of Samson and Delilah, having heard it first from an overzealous Sunday school teacher after she had been forced to attend by her mother. Jean Granger had been going through one of her ‘make Hermione social phases’, maybe if she had headed her mother she might not have got to this point, it was a pointless rebuke.

From what her fuzzy mind could piece together she remembered Samson’s strength lying in his hair, though that had never been the case for her she was well aware that the guards were not attempting to take away her power, which had long since been taken. No, they were looking to tear away another piece of her identity.

When to tell them that it had already gone?

Once they began brandishing the reflective metal in front of her face, Hermione averted her gaze. They may have spoken to her; she couldn't be sure, she got lost again, staring at the worn tiles and tracking the fluttering brown strands. It took an age, but eventually, once her head felt impossibly light, the two male guards left the room, leaving her with the mean looking woman she had seen upon entry.

Hermione was unceremoniously stripped and pushed into the nearest shower to stand under water so hot it instantly burnt her skin, she was pulled out again after a few minutes, and was left to stand naked in the cold room, until the clothes she had been wearing were thrown at her. Typically they would be issued ‘new’ things, but Hermione was pretty sure as far as she was concerned there would be very little protocol being followed. Once she was dressed she was taken back to her cell, none of the guards said another word.

Hermione waited until they were entirely gone, not just in sight but noise too, all her time in the dark was forcing her to rely on her other senses. In this place just because you couldn't see a threat, didn't mean it wasn't there. Once they were far away, she raised a hand falteringly to her head to feel the short, uneven crop that was left behind. The downy fluff felt so foreign against her skin that she moved her hand away. Instead, she ran her fingers over the top of her worn robes, where locks of her hacked hair gripped among the fibres. She pulled out the longest strands and delicately laid them side by side next to her cot as if they were cut stem roses.

* * *

It didn't take much time for a routine to be born, unsurprising as it varied so little. Tracking time was impossible, so Hermione focussed on filling moments.

She carefully picked her robes clean; she scratched at the collected dirt on her shoes. She laid on her cot, first one way and then another and she tried to remember.

All the time, she tried to remember.

* * *

When she had been told she had a visitor Hermione had sat in the room she was taken to and straightened her robes. She couldn't think of a single person that would have wanted to see her, at least, not for any interaction that was likely to end well for her. She didn't move when the door opened behind her, not until her vision was filled with familiar bright blonde hair and pale skin.

“Hello Hermione,” Luna said calmly.

When Hermione felt Luna’s eyes on her, she lifted her head to meet them. She hadn't gone that in months, not since that night, well, not counting her interaction with Evander. But this was different; this was someone from her life, someone who had known her before she began her broken, twisted, half existence. Words wouldn't come, maybe they never would, but she could do this, offer some small semblance of her forgotten humanity.

Luna didn't stay long, didn't ask any questions, she just spoke. Her words so soft and light they bathed Hermione in a gentle kindness that she found harder to deal with than the more common abuse. Luna’s demeanour remained open as she filled her in on the news from outside. Jobs people were taking, plans that were being weaved together, all delivered with a serenity that made Hermione’s skin itch.

Harry was going to get married.

The was the last thing Luna said, though whether it had been deliberately saved that way Hermione wasn’t certain. She was too busy trying not to panic as her throat closed instinctively as soon as the words were uttered. But even then no sound would come out.

She supposed she should be happy, they were moving on if that was happening. She was sure Ginny would make a beautiful bride.

Before she left, Luna deposited a large box on the table, filled with books, lots of them and even a couple of decks of muggle playing cards.

“You’ll have to share these I’m afraid,” she said, “you can't have anything in your… room, but I am told you are allowed these in the shared spaces.”

Hermione said nothing.

She stood to go, and Hermione sucked in a long breath as Luna reached forward and twined her hand through hers. The moment the other girl’s pale flesh collided with hers something inside Hermione broke, she hadn't been touched, not with kindness since… since…

She understood the visit for what it was when Luna left the room. Hermione reflexively clenched her fingers against the edge of the table, once again cursing her lucidity. Even then she still couldn’t find the words to thank her former friend for her gentle goodbye.

Back in the cell, after enduring the cards taunts as they threw the books at her, Hermione curled up on the dirty cot as silent tears streamed down her face.

* * *

The third time Evander saw the girl her hair was gone, not trimmed, not shortened, gone. Hacked. As she slumped down the wall clutching a book as she had done before, he regarded the uneven strands and the closeness of her hair. He could see her scalp in places, those little tufts of coarse hair doing more to awaken his darker impulses than anything had in years.

Once it had only been one person that brought out his darkest side. There was a time when just looking at his father would bring forward emotions that the old man had long thought his son incapable of. It wasn’t true of course. Evander hadn’t ended up with a brand in his arm as a reminder of good deeds after all.

But now as he looked at the girl he could feel it fluttering on the edges of his conscious, the need to remove their skin as they had shawn her hair. The desire to hold them down to look at them more carefully, as if examining insects under a magnifying glass, to make them twitch in discomfort like they tried to do to her, to give them no room to breathe.

 _Fear me._ For _I never needed a mask to cover the violence that I am capable of. For my face was forever calm as I snuffed out life._

Evander felt more than saw the reactions of the room around him. While no one from the side of the so-called light, let alone someone as prominent as her, could have been considered welcome, there was an us and them that came into force while in the prison, the traditional rules didn't apply. If the guards had done it to her, they could attempt to do it to them.

Being a Death Eater, and surviving the inclusion in their ranks was all about politics, some may have considered Evander in a weaker position because he had not been housed with most of the others while at school, but it was no matter. He had been a quiet child, with a father to avoid, he was more adept at reading an unspoken shift in a collection of people than most, and he felt it then. Could feel the room reforming around him.

In a way that the guards would never understand, in a way that the girl herself probably wouldn't even have considered, everything had changed. That crop was as efficient as a mark being branded into her arm. She was one of them now, she hadn’t chosen it, much like he hadn’t, it didn't change the outcome.

Thoughts of brands made Evander look at the skin on her arms; he could see faint burn marks, whatever it had been it hadn't been enough to blister, just sufficient to leave swathes of unusually red skin.

His eyes skimmed along her flesh to her hands; they were clear, no knicks or bruising.

She had let it happen.

* * *

Hermione’s first thought as she jolted awake was one of mild surprise that she had been asleep, it took a moment to register the absolute pain in her throat, it was raw, ripped to ribbons. Her heart rate was not just accelerated; it was pounding, the violent beating in her chest making her torso heave unnaturally.

She had been screaming.

Her dreams, a pastiche of shaky, bloody hands, too white flesh and spell fire, undercut with pressuring anxiety, faded.

She settled her body back into the cot, reaching for the insubstantial blanket to cover her now damp robes. It was moments before other anguished yells permeated her panic attack, the noise ripping through the brick.

Was this the first time her wails had joined the lost soul’s chorus?

* * *

After Evander had come over to her that first day, he made a point of coming to sit next to her for a least a few minutes of their stretch in the room. He seemed pleased with the additional reading material and would often finish a particular page or paragraph only to push the paper into Hermione’s hands for her to read also. She would nod her head when she was done, and he would take it back. Sometimes he would talk to her, little things about the routine, like how they came to the room once a week, Hermione couldn't be sure if she had assumed it was more or less time passed between stints.

Sometimes others would come over, mainly to just take a closer look at her before they walked away, though Thorfinn Rowle would stay a little longer at times, sitting down next to Avery so they could whisper among themselves.

Hermione was struggling to finish an unfamiliar verse Evander had pushed in front of her when quick steps sounded in front of them.

“Stay still,” he whispered calmly into her ear, his words ceasing her fingers path along the bottom of the line she was reading and she complied immediately.

Rabastan Lestrange came to a halt in front of her, Hermione didn't look up, but she could hear his laboured breathing, could identify him from the skin she could see, exposed by the trouser legs to his robes that didn't quite reach the ground. Evander circled a hand around her wrist, and Hermione suppressed a flinch at the surprisingly warm touch, he had never done that before. It was different to how it had felt when Luna reached for her, her friend's hand had broken some of her walls down, Evander’s fortified them.

“Out of the way, Avery,” Rabastan snapped aggressively, moving forward, his canvassed feet almost on her crossed knees.

“Fuck off Lestrange,” a voice sounded from the other side of the room, and Thorfinn moved around the stationary observers to settle on her other side, arms folded and leaning, relaxed against the wall.

Rabastan looked down at her with a sneer lighting his lips. “What the fuck are you doing here Granger? How did the Order’s pet genius manage to get herself thrown in her with the damned?”

She didn't respond, though, as had become her custom, she glanced up to meet his gaze, Rabastan looked like he would froth at the mouth.

“Come on, fair's fair, you know why we're here,” he called mockingly and dropped to his knees in a quick movement that made Thorfinn reach an arm forward that he battered away.

“Fuck you Rowle,” he spat, before ripping up the sleeve of his thin robes and shoving it under her nose, “See Granger, you know our secrets.”

The Dark Mark against Rabastan flesh was faded a little now, the lines around the skull and snake marginally blurred, the entrenched ink looking like a child had painted slightly outside the lines. The body of the tattoo was no longer black, more muted colour.

Murky grey, just like everything else.

“It still hurts,” Rabastan muttered, falling back to sit on his bum and folding his legs in front of him.

Hermione moved her hand to cover Evander’s fingers, gently pulling them apart and releasing her wrist from his solid grasp. Never taking her eyes from her forearm, she moved up the thin material of her sleeve and exposed the jagged scarred lettering that would never heal. She laid upturned against her knee, mirroring his pose.

“Still hurt?” Rabastan croaked.

Hermione nodded.

* * *

The route to the shower block took Evander past the cell that housed her. Hermione.

He thought about her name often. It had never even stuck in his brain before. At meetings, she had been ‘Granger’, the unfamiliar name being a reminder to all of her other moniker ‘the Mudblood’. He didn’t use her name, not out loud at least; he had a feeling she wouldn’t answer to it at present.

On their way passed Evander would turn his head as much as he could, against the force of the collar, just in time to get a glimpse of her folded up on the cot, staring blankly at the ceiling. But today she was sat in the very centre of the floor, resting on her knees, holding her hands out in front of her and away from her body.

Like she was afraid of them.

* * *

There were three thousand, two hundred and seventeen slick grey bricks that made up the walls of her crumbling cell.

She was taken for a shower on a Monday, though she had no idea whether it was a consistent time.

On Wednesdays, the guards came in for a cell ‘inspection’ though their behaviour varied. Some of them just liked to stare at her, to try and make her uncomfortable, some whispered taunts, and some roughed her up a little. One had even undone his belt once, stalking towards her and listing off all the ways he would make her scream.

Hermione had looked back at him, as blankly as ever, though inside her heart had begun to race. Something in her vacant expression made him pause. He left soon after that, though he slapped the side of her face as he left, spitting at her when she crumpled to the floor.

She reflected that they still weirdly feared her, even in her obviously incapacitated state.

Fridays she was thrown into the room with the Death Eaters, all that remained of them, or so Avery had told her.

* * *

It took months, maybe longer, but finally, with some gentle coaxing from Evander, Hermione moved to sit at one of the tables when she came to the room now. He sometimes looked over what she was reading or invited her to swap books with him; there wasn't a lot to pick from.

Luna had not been back.

Hermione barely took in words, but it was something to do. She often wondered how old Hermione, whole Hermione, would feel about her now. Even reading was lost to her, the words scattered and danced about the pages, mocking her blankness.

As she sat trying to thread the latest sentence through her mind, a chair in front of her was dragged across the floor, and Louis Travers dropped languidly into it.

“Slow,” Evander whispered in her ear, and Hermione softly placed the book she was holding on the table in front of her, before instinctively moving her arm towards Evander. Without any further word between them he gently circled his warm fingers around her wrist, in a secure loop, it was enough encouragement for her to move her eyes from the top of the table.

Hermione had always thought that Travers had a ‘kind face’ and had mulled over whether that was an aid or a hindrance in his chosen profession. Despite his incarceration, he looked much the same as he ever had, his skin, unlike hers, had retained his sun-kissed colour.

“Your screaming,” he began, approps to nothing, “you should start practising Occlumency.”

Hermione looked up at him, her face revealing nothing.

“It helps with some of the darker thoughts,” he explained looking at her intently.

She pondered that for awhile, not sure whether she could even be considered as having thoughts at all anymore, regardless of their place on a spectrum. Her brain now only seemed to list things rather than think of anything, though she supposed she did expend most of her mental energy trying to separate reality from either imagination or hallucination, which didn't leave much for high-level reflection.

“You don't need a wand,” he continued before he looked at Evander, the two men stared at each other for a few moments, silent communication moving between them until Evander nodded and Travers looked back at her.

“I could help you.”

* * *

When Evander woke from a dream, it was to the bizarre sensation that he felt peaceful. He couldn't remember all of it, only dregs, like the bottom of an abandoned coffee cup remained.

He had seen the bird again, it was still broken, still lost and in the wrong place but it rested on the ledge at the crack in his cell wall and looked out. In the dawning light, he could see how its feathers had been cropped close, though they had looked better, healthier than Evander had remembered seeing before.

_All things in good time._


	3. Chapter 3

Hermione wasn’t certain when her existence inside the prison walls became normal; nothing had been normal in such a long time. Maybe it had never been. But somehow, whether it was just the routine or the numb familiarity, it became her way of life.

She seemed to pick up that the Death Eaters had changed around her now, maybe her presence was normal for them too. Eyes didn’t stare at her when she entered the room anymore, at least not all at once, and if they did look, it was not for long. Some even spoke to her, though, unlike the guards, they never seemed expectant of a reply.

They weren’t what she would once have called kind, at least not overtly. Their ways were differing and often either understated or harsh, it sometimes took her hours after interactions to unpick the dialogue to find what was lingering underneath.

Following a particularly rigorous guard inspection, Hermione had entered the white space a little stiffer than normal. She could almost feel the intake of breath as her hand went to the wall to support her limping gait. Her time in the quiet made it easier for her to pick up on subtle changes in ways she never had before. When she flinchingly took her usual seat, it was only to wince again when the table was disturbed by Rabastan sitting down slowly in front of them.

“More than one?” He asked roughly, leaning forward on the rickety furniture baring his teeth.

When she nodded, he released a slight hiss before he slammed his hand's palm down in front of her. Her eyes were drawn to them, placed as they were directly in her line of vision. Rough abrasions and untreated cuts lined the surface of his knuckles, and when Hermione managed to look up, he was smirking at her.

“More than one this week for me too, though, I got a few good hits in before I went down.”

Rabastan turned away then, berating Thorfinn over some action that happened in a time long forgotten. For the first time since Hermione had gone to the prison, the atmosphere in the room was almost jovial, at least by their standards. It didn’t make it better. But it stopped her thinking about Wednesday night, when she had curled on the floor of the cell, too weak to get up and lay on the thin mattress as she coughed up blood in great heaves the reminded her with every breath how much of a beating she had taken.

* * *

Images fluttered behind Hermione’s eyes at regular intervals. When it wasn’t extracts from that night, the night when all of this had begun, it was snippets from the days and weeks afterwards. Kingsley’s concerned frown, Luna’s absent gaze and worst of all Harry’s disbelieving expression.

As painful as it was to see them night after night, sitting before her in silent judgement, it was worse when they were gone, and she was alone again.

* * *

Hermione wasn't sure when Evander had noticed that she wasn't actually reading, whether it had been obvious when she was totally faking or only now when she was trying but failing. Either way, he did. Evander was the most attentive person she had ever known. One day he stopped pressing passages into her hesitant fingers, and she knew.

He never called her out, either on her deception or the difficulties she couldn't overcome. Instead, he started reading to her. His voice would be softer at these times than the tone he usually used, and he would sit closer. He wouldn't say anything else, just recite the words on the pages in a low register, a steady timber.

It wasn't any easier at first, to process the words that were spoken. Where the ink lines on the parchment had fluttered and scrambled in front of Hermione’s eyes, Evander’s words floated independently of each other as they left his lips, the sentences got out of order, and Hermione couldn't follow the meanings, but the emotion he expressed somehow permeated her shell.

Even though Evander spoke quietly, he spoke beautifully. His delivery was crisp and earnest, and Hermione was left in no doubt that he felt whatever overture he was absorbed in.

It was captivating, it brought colour to the room around them, and though she occasionally noticed that some of the others moved closer, the performance only ever seemed to be for her.

Over time they came back to her, Evander’s glistening words, if she concentrated hard enough, Hermione could get them to lay straight. They didn't help her to feel, but they hinted that one day, there might be a possibility she could emote some semblance of their meaning.

* * *

Evander would drop his inflexion lower when he slipped his own words into those he recited. He tried to control himself not to do it often, and at least managed to school his features, steadfastly resting his eyes onto the parchment when a line from his mind would slip from his tongue.

He could see how Hermione struggled. How he would place a picture in front of her, and it would somehow break as it reached her fingers, how she would faltering move to piece it back together again.

_Pieces, pieces, pieces, and none of them the right fit to make the broken bird whole again._

Evander’s hands would grip the book within his grasp reflectively as he bore his soul, though not through fear of discovery. He knew if she were better she would suss him in an instant, one day she would. Maybe it would be a game then, a real exchange. For now, it was a one-sided volley, but he didn’t mind.

He couldn’t mind; he had no choice but to air the words that climbed his throat.

They formed there when she came in the room and quietly took her seat next to him; they formed sentences, each deeper than the last when she pushed her arm towards his so that he could hold her wrist.

She didn't know they were there yet, didn’t know they were for her, but she would.

* * *

The atmosphere was different that day, a slight weight to the air around them that might have been imperceptible to anyone else, but to the occupants of that room, stained by war, it was all too clear. On reflection it had been ramping to this for a while, Hermione had not fared well in the last few weeks, and after a few occasions of walking into the room absently clutching at herself to be able to keep moving she had come in this week with a bruise on her face.

It was blue, Evander noted with some stirring of emotion. The contusion covered her right lid and permeated the ever present bag underneath it. A ripple of colour that was a vibrant lapis in the centre and faded out to shades of grey.

He touched her face for the first time that day, lightly pressing his fingers under her chin to move her head from one side to the other.

_Who, upon finding the form of a broken bird, would crush its damaged wings under their heel?_

He moved his chair closer than ever to Hermione as two guards walked into the barren room, halfway through their allotted time, when two more arrived and stood by the door as the first to enter walked forward Evander glanced at Thorfinn who nodded grimly.

The focus of the invading forces was entirely on Hermione; you would have been forgiven for thinking that she was a lone person in the room from the way they ignored the serial sinners around her. Evander felt his lip curl into a sneer as he watched the look of pure contempt flash across the face of the guard that was the closest to their table.

“Look at that Stephens, didn't take her long to ingratiate herself here did it,” the first man said. Evander had never bothered to learn their names, they were less than nothing to him, though he did look up to look the man over, to catch him staring down at Hermione with a hungry glint in his eye.

“Even evil has use of a whore,” the other guard spoke, and they both laughed at his quip.

Evander tilted his head to the side as he watched them, meaning you wish you could fuck her, he thought disgusted, though who could tell whether their drive was to humiliate or to find a way to assert their dominance finally. Did it irritate them more that she didn’t react, or that they were somehow still frightened of her?

“Don’t know what he ever saw in you, sour cow. You were his choice, he could have had anyone, and you killed him,” the accusation rang out in the now silent room though no one moved to react.

“In his sleep. He deserved better than that,” the other guard continued.

Hermione for her part, ignored their taunting, though Evander saw her wince as they mentioned the death. The murder. It had been the first indication any of them had gotten as to how she had ended up there.

He had assumed murder, and either Potter or Weasley seemed the most likely targets. Evander had considered, given what she had done for the war, that almost anyone else might have been, well, not forgivable, but would have still ensured the others would get her out of it. The side of light was well practised in turning a blind eye when they thought it was got the greater good.

Though murder in his sleep? Not a chance.

Evander reached under the table to circle her small wrist in his hand as the taunts continued.

“Always thought she was above where she was from.”

“Obviously not happy with her little slice of the fame pie.”

_Spare me, if there is such a thing as the divine, spare me. Give me boredom, give me eternal damnation but do not make me suffer fools._

The guards moved closer, their tones heightening as anger began to cloud their already questionable judgment. Thorfinn walked through them purposefully, sitting at the table in front of himself and Hermione.

Evander tightened his grip on her arm. His fingers clenched almost to the point of causing her pain; it was enough for her to turn her head to look at him, a question on her face, it was enough for her to look and see him, see in his eyes how the words meant nothing to him.

“Uppity bitch,” the guard hissed, spittle flying from his mouth.

Thorfinn sat forward to gently wipe the saliva that had connected on her cheek. His dirty hands left more of a mark than the guard had done, but the point had been made.

Hermione didn’t move.

“Serves you right that they would put you in here.”

“Only thing more suitable than death is to live being punished for what you have done.”

Louis moved then, stopping to stand behind Hermione’s chair. An action that didn't surprise Evander. Travers had been quite taken with the little witch, devoting much of their shared time to helping her with Occlumency, despite her reticence. Evander had thought it was for the sheer relief of having something to do, but maybe it was more than that.

Hermione’s silence was comforting in a way that nothing else here was. Though it was more than her lack of speech, whatever Hermione had done, not that he had honestly ever cared, she was still inherently good, and it shone from within her. Had she truly been what the guards thought of her she wouldn't have been so broken.

It was their loss.

Evander hoped it was his gain, but it was too soon to tell.

They spat at her before leaving. Evander didn’t let go of her wrist until they were broken apart when they came back to announce the end of time.

* * *

Sometimes, when the prism was quiet, and Hermione’s mind was clear from the consistent buzzing, she would sit forward on the end of the cot and trace patterns into the dirty floor with a single finger. It was a rudimentary attempt at a timeline, often hopelessly out of order and filled with gaping holes in her memory.

More often than not the exercise would end with Hermione on her feet, rubbing all the progress away with the bottom of her shoes. But some days a new memory would come dragged from somewhere in the recesses of her splinted mind and Hermione would place it onto the dirty ground before laying back on the cot, sleeping as if she could clutch the newly discovered part of herself to her chest.

* * *

Selwyn made a move on a day that was like every other, with no idea of time or season, without any possible catalyst that Hermione could think of.

Not that he would need one.

All of them showed signs of mental scarring, most of them had been fighting before she was even born, but Ade had apparently lost his faculties a long time before.

When Hermione walked up to get a book from the rickety trolley he pounced, shoving her against a wall, his hand pushing hard into her shoulder as he looked at her wildly, she didn't fight against him; rather she became limp in his hold. Her lack of reaction seemed to confuse him at first before it enraged him, and he lifted an arm to wrap a hand around her throat. With the angry touch, something inside her entire being shifted, unlocking a survival instinct that she had long thought buried.

As he hissed at her in a series of nonsensical ramblings, he increased the already brutal pressure against her windpipe, and Hermione lifted her hands and pushed her thumbs into his eyes, just enough so that he dropped her. Without his body pinning her savagely she slumped to the floor, and it was only then that she realised how everyone else was on their feet.

Evander had rushed forward and was clutching at her chin, moving it this way and that, looking at her neck, saying something, but none of it registered, it had all come back, all of it, tears ran down her face to fast she could barely see.

_Her and Ron, broken and bloodied standing amongst the rubble at the final battle, he reached out his hand and looped it through hers, and she gave him a hesitant smile, now they could live._

_Her and Ron as she peeled off her clothes, his eyes lingering on the scar that cut across her torso, on the words that were carved into her arms._

_Her and Ron as he gave her a ring, as she said yes. Him lifting her off the ground and twirling her body as they both laughed in the orchard of the Burrow._

_Ron buying her flowers when she got her first job at the Ministry, ‘I’m so proud of you, even if it's just for now’._

_Her and Ron buying their first place, smaller than he had been expecting, but cosy and warm._

_Her and Ron fitting out the flat, arguing about each other's stuff, little squabbles, the stuff of life._

_Her and Ron in a heated staring match across the table as he complained about dinner, again. ‘Why couldn't you just get back earlier, I’m so sick of eating the same thing all the time’._

_Ron holding her in the night as she woke up screaming, crying, the shadows of the past still clawing into her._

_Her and Ron being followed by the press everywhere, her hating it and him taking it all in his stride._

_Ron coming home after an argument holding a bag of ice-cream through the kitchen door before he walked in, making her laugh._

_Her rushing home after work to make him one of his favourites for their anniversary, him smiling and kissing her pastry mix splattered face as she whooped when she pulled the meal out of the oven._

_Her being knocked over by an enthusiastic photographer and Ron not noticing as he posed for pictures._

_Their warm little home becoming colder._

_Ron being made Auror, a change in shift patterns, coming home later and later._

_The first time she had found a number in his trousers when she was doing a wash._

_And the next…_

_And the next..._

_Her teaching Ron to drive, screaming as he mounted a roundabout and quick, frantic sex in the backseats in an unobserved lane._

_Fucking and fighting, fucking and fighting, fucking and fighting._

_The alcohol, first a few drinks here and there and then always a drink._

_Her hiding out at work, requesting extra projects and putting in more hours than she needed._

_Slurring words and lingering touches, unwanted touches._

_Ron blaming her, blaming her for her lack of maternal instinct._

_Her looking at Ginny running around the baby clothes store, wondering if she was broken because it didn’t excite her._

_Then that night, the night it had all gone wrong. Ron was there, and he was drunk, so much drunker than he had ever been before. He thought she was having an affair, something to account for her hours of work and she laughed at him, laughed, she told him all about the numbers, and he blanched._

_‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ he screamed._

_‘Because I didn't care’ she replied without thinking, and the silence was deafening._

_He raced towards her then, his eyes glazed, clouded by hurt and whisky; he grabbed her throat, his thick fingers coiling there as he pushed her against the wall… the pain… the anger… the suppressed hurt and humiliation…_

“I snapped,” she said into the aged cream room, and she felt all eyes on her, she hadn't spoken since that night; the words felt foreign on her tongue.

She looked up at Evander who was staring at her wide-eyed, he dropped down to sit on the ground next to her and pulled her against his side, not firmly or affectionately but safely, she didn't say anything else, he didn't ask her for anything else.

She felt safe. It was the first definitive emotion she could register having felt for the longest time.

* * *

The guards had eventually come in, dragging away a screaming Selwyn and a shell-shocked Hermione in their wake. Evander supposed once they had waited long enough to realise that the wizard wasn’t actually about to kill her, it made sense to remove him before he became unmanageable, and her before the rest of them could do anything to help her.

Evander sat back in his usual seat numbly, his eyes falling back to the wall where she had been held. He’d had to face the reality she was being mistreated for months, visible marks on her body and an increasingly hollow look to her face, but seeing it had been an entirely different thing.

Then she had spoken, her tear-clogged words almost ripping through his chest, cutting him open with surprise.

For the first time he had suppressed what he wanted to say, ‘of course you snapped’, he wanted to scream, angry beyond any credible intelligence at people who were long dead. People that had shaped her into what she was, anger at himself for being part of the threat that had snatched away from her childhood, and anger at her. Anger at her for in anyway caring what she did to him.

He felt Thorfinn sit in the chair next to him and he hung his head, he didn’t want to talk about it, he wanted to run, to do something, anything that would remove the new images he had of the bruises lining her throat, the fear in her eyes.

_Dreams have come so often, your face lit with the inner workings of your heart, but never fear, why come back to all that you are if that is all you will feel?_

* * *

When Hermione was back in the confines of the cell, she dried her eyes. So many things had awoken in her, memories of a time when she had gotten all that she had ever wanted, only to find that the dreams were as tarnished as she was.

As it turned out she had never deserved happiness.

She could spend a lifetime now, piecing together all of the events, working out the minute detail of what had happened. Why it had happened.

Or not.

Hermione looked down at the thin bangle on her arm contemplating. When Selwyn had grabbed her, she had felt a surge in her core. A similar sensation to the binding she had felt with the restraint had been pressed onto her wrist in the first place.

She was sure old Hermione would have said it was time to make a moral choice, but old Hermione wasn't there.

* * *

When Hermione sat at the table the next time, Rabastan was there. Evander had gotten up as she sat down, moving to the other side of the room to calm Selwyn back down. She tried to concentrate on her book to avoid listening to the words that were leaking from the rabid wizard's mouth, that was until a deck of cards hit her chest.

Rabastan ripped the book out of her fingers when she didn't stop to what she was doing, and Hermione felt a simmering irritation, so low it barely registered, but it was there.

“For fuck's sake teach me a game I don't know,” he barked, and Hermione sat up a little straighter before fanning the cards out in between her fingers.

After a moment's contemplation, she nodded and set up the deck to teach him how to play poker.

* * *

Hermione’s speech did not go back to normal straight away; she had gotten used to saying little, and the habit stuck, it wasn't as if there was a great deal to discuss where they were. So when she moved her lips to Evander’s ear, he stiffened in surprise before she dropped her metal clad wrist across his poetry volume.

“I may have found a way.”

His hand reached up to loop around her hand holding it tightly, his eyes searching hers in silent question, before he nodded, signalling Thorfinn from his side of the room.

Words were unnecessary when people already understood what you were trying to say.

* * *

Hermione stepped over the temporarily incapacitated guard and walked over to Thorfinn cell; it had been decided that while they were without magic, he was the biggest asset, literally. Once the bars clanked open, she released his bracelet, and he pulled her into a firm, quick, embrace before walking past her to go to the guard's side. She immediately moved to Avery’s cell repeating the process.

In the end, it was all done with very minimal fuss, bar herself and Evander having a silent conversation outside Ade’s cell before she pushed ahead and released him.

“He’s a liability,” Rabastan whispered as he stalked passed, dropping a thick coat over her shoulders.

“Aren't’ we all,” she replied, and he smirked at her.

Now they were stood at the edge of the crumbling rock, looking out across the raging sea. Evander leant forward and circled her wrist with his delicate fingers.

“Hermione?”

She looked up at him, the man she knew to be detached enough from life's experience to be a monster, a man that had now become her anchor and nodded. His face broke into a warm smile, the kind of smile that made her feel heat in the tips of her fingers, made her feel like she might be able to return it one day.

He stepped forward and laid a kiss on her forehead, running his empty hand through her shorn hair.


	4. Chapter 4

When Hermione once again found herself stood upon the jagged rocks, facing the desperately tumultuous tide, she felt as if she were at the final battle again, looking out across the debris strewn courtyard at an unbeatable foe, a sea of black, glinting in the dawning light. In her weakened state, she felt vulnerable, perishable, shivering against the bitter cold as her sodden shoes slipped over the slick ground. She didn't even think about using one of the liberated wands they had. Evander had made to place one in her chilled fingers, but Hermione had moved her hand away from his, for the first time. The action seemed to startle them both before Evander, ever the perceptive soul shook his head and pulled on the edge of her coat, placing the wand deep within an inside pocket.

Evander had stepped away then, moving to stand behind Rabastan as someone cast a Tempus, and a few words were exchanged. Hermione barely paid attention to the goings on around her, but she saw enough to know she had missed some things of late. Whatever they were doing now had already been planned.

Hermione wasn’t left alone for long, something that provided her with some degree of comfort. Evander had barely moved from her side before Travers was occupying the vacant spot. She hadn’t seen him since the escape began and while she couldn't have honestly said she had been looking for him, Hermione felt a small nudge of relief that he had made it. She noticed a trail of blood falling thickly from his hairline. It had trickled down his skin in a relatively straight line until it had reached his heavy brow, the individual strands of dark hair had interrupted the sticky flow and splayed it in all directions until it covered most of the left side of his face.

Hermione imagined that had she not spent the last few months locked away in the prison, the sight of an injury like that would have been immensely triggering. The blood was something that even in her darkest days she never forgot, the way it moved, the way it sounded. Hermione supposed she should be somewhat thankful to the guards after all, for their unknowing distribution of immersion therapy.

Travers stepped forward with an arm extended as if to reach for her, but before any contact was made he paused and seemed to rethink his actions. He’s afraid, Hermione’s mind whispered, and she instinctively took a step back from him. The guards fear of her had been baffling and seemingly unsurpassable, the idea that those around her now thought of her as some rabid beast was vaguely repellent.

Travers looked at her for a moment with sad eyes, and Hermione straightened her shoulders to take in his dark brown gaze. In a strange way, they suited his face, melancholic as they often appeared. When he eventually turned away Travers raised the liberated wand in his grasp to waist height and wordlessly cast in a broad sweep that reminded Hermione of a determined fisherman, except, instead of wire, his movement left an arc of the brightest blue in its wake.

Little patches of shimmering turquoise appeared over the murky water that was still frantically lapping at the rugged coast. The spots were small and oddly shaped, and it took Hermione’s dull brain a minute to realise he had conjured them to act as stepping stones.

“Follow,” Travers said, before taking a step forward onto the first and waiting until more appeared in front before continuing.

And she did.

* * *

When they reached ‘dry land’ Rabastan howled loudly in unbridled exaltation for several minutes. He swore to every magical deity there was, repeatedly, until Thorfinn shut him up with a swift whack to the back of his head. The two men tussled for a while, but it seemed more good-natured than combative, at least no wands were drawn. As no one even slightly reacted, Hermione imagined this behaviour was a relatively common occurrence or had been, before.

Once they got themselves dry it wasn’t long before they were on the move again, she supposed it made sense not to stick around in any one place for too long. Not that Hermione knew anything of their final destination, or whether she was even welcome, she just kept walking. She followed behind whoever was in front, her gaze fixed on their shoulder and matched their pace.

It was an odd feeling, in many ways she had been little more than a follower all her life, in some cases, she just hadn’t quite realised it, and yet now, the simple act of wordlessly making steps was more liberating than even leaving the prison had been. She wasn’t responsible for answers here; she could make up the numbers without chastisement.

As they moved away from a clump of savage looking trees, Selwyn moved into step beside her. Hermione hadn’t been too close to the highly strung man since he had attacked her. The journey so far had done nothing to improve his demeanour. Selwyn shook in an exaggerated way and routinely clawed at his skin as if searching for something under the scabbed layers. Hermione kept her neck stiff as he slowed his pace to remain in time with hers, she watched him out of the corner of her eyes and saw him stare at her feet so he could perfectly match her steps. He moved to walk closer and closer until he was almost tripping over much smaller form but he never touched her.

Selwyn tugged at his hair viciously every now and again, and Hermione wondered if that was to stop himself from reaching his dirty fingers for her throat. But she never reacted. She was no more afraid of his unleashing violence than she was of anything else.

They stopped routinely, giving the few that seemed to be in charge of this ‘mission’ a chance to confer before they carried on. As it got colder, Hermione wrapped the coat Rabastan had draped over her tighter, sinking her cold fingers into the pockets. Though the cold didn't bother her, it was nothing to how it had felt dwelling within the slick dampness of Azkaban. This cold was a temporary thing, it lashed against her skin and ruffled the uneven strands of her hair, but it didn’t sink into her bones.

Evander never let her out of his sight, not for too long anyway. He routinely turned from his place in the procession, moving his eyes until he saw her, tipping his head to the side in silent question, she responded in kind, and he would turn back around, satisfied that she did not need him until he would repeat the process half an hour later.

Not that Hermione ever fell behind, she might have been smaller, but she had been incarcerated for a hell of a lot less time than the others had.

They continued to move, step by step, in virtual silence.

After so much time in the Wizarding world covering such a large distance by foot almost felt primitive, but necessary. Apparition had been out of the question, their bodies too depleted, detection too likely.

Hermione pondered on being caught as the emerging dawn sliced through the forest they were navigating. She could imagine other lights, of an artificial nature, blinding through the trees. She could almost hear the quickened steps, the yells of victory as they were uncovered. Would she fight for her freedom? The only answer her mind would give was ‘what for?’.

When they had come for her last time, she hadn’t moved, slumped as she was in grief, in disbelief, in horror.

They had asked her what had happened, interrogated her for hours. At first, she had tried to reply, only for the words to crackle and die in her worn throat. In the end, a Pensieve had been brought in, and Hermione had been gripped by two wizards as another brutally ripped the memory from her mind. Whatever they saw made them pale, made them stand away from her, there was no more getting into her face. She had reached for the Pensieve herself when they were done, half mad with desperation to see the events that had become blocked to her conscious mind, the other half of herself trembling with the fear of what the reality of her unleashed savagery would look like. But they hadn’t let her and that exclusion from witnessing part of herself, however dark, broke her aknew.

Hermione’s eyes fell to the floor to better navigate the twisted roots that lined the undergrowth. No doubt the faces that she had imprinted on her soul would be worse this time if they found them. She had associated herself with them now. There would be no more bafflement; there would be scorn, anger, violent reproach.

Maybe it would still be worth it, to see them all one last time.

* * *

Hermione didn't have time to stare up at the manor she was dropped in front of, she only managed a cursory glance at the gleaming brickwork before she was ushered inside, the press of the wards wrapping around her as she crossed the threshold like tethered silk. The Death Eaters, it seemed, were not as unprepared for the ultimate eventuality of the war as some might have thought.

The Order were clearly not the only ones who could make a building unplottable.

The others had gone as they came towards their journey's end. Figures left the procession after hours of endless trudging, each off to their interim destinations. Few goodbyes were spoken, Hermione observed that there was little finality in the muted departures. She was certain from the way they looked at each other, the soft words that were exchanged, that they would all be together again.

A simple train of thought had begun at some point during the night, cloaked as they were in the pitch dark. What if they wanted to start it all up again? Hermione had shushed it up before her mind could truthfully answer.

She didn't want to know.

Soon it had been just the two of them, Evander and herself. She looked at him as they walked through the wide hall of his home and wondered when he would start to change. When would whatever it was between them warp, and become a macabre distortion of these early moments?

When would looking at his angular features bring her pain?

Evander had never asked her to come with him and yet it seemed implied. When Rabastan, the last to go, had turned suddenly with a wave over his head Hermione had looked to him, Evander, her new due north, with her eyebrows slightly raised. He had walked on ahead of her, and she had followed.

As they walked through corridors in their usual silence, Hermione realised that they had never actually been alone before. It should have felt strange, awkward, maybe even frightening, but none of those feelings came to the surface. She would have thought that indicative of her withdrawal and yet when she was next to Evander, she didn't necessarily feel anything, but she didn't feel blank either. It was as if she was trapped between nothingness and somethingness. She just didn't know which one to rely on, which one to press herself against.

Hermione followed Evander as they went upstairs, walking just behind him as they continued down a vast hall until they stopped in front of a room with an open door. It was a bedroom, which Hermione supposed was logical, it was dark again though she had lost track of how many days they had been moving. Nevertheless, in spite of the reasonableness of their location she panicked slightly Evander walked into the room behind her. She told herself that the crushing of his booted feet against the expensive carpet was no doubt louder in her mind than it was in reality.

Hermione wasn’t afraid of him, she was never afraid of him, but she was desperately unsure. The piercing sharpness of that was shocking. It made her feel like old Hermione for just a fleeting moment, a memory of a girl that would get so awkward she could lose control of her speech.

She gritted her teeth and concentrated on turning back to the blankness that gave her some semblance of numb peace. It was harder than ever before.

Evander had left though, after pointing her in the direction of the ensuite bathroom. Whether sensing her level of debilitation or through his own exhaustion, he had retreated from the newly given space. He had wished her a good night and stepped around her so she could see his face.

_He never moves me into place, even though that action would be simpler._

_He shifts himself, the Earth, the alignment of the stars, all to settle around me._

When Hermione met his eyes, Evander delicately tugged on a piece of her rough crop, a longer clump that stuck out in front of her ear, and then he had left.

Hermione laid back on the bed that dominated the centre of the room, looking up at the ceiling. Her body was rigidly placed, it seemed best to avoid movement as much as possible. The give of the mattress on the bed, the luxurious cotton blend of the sheets, the fluff of the duvet, it hurt. The sinking softness of the pillows felt like they were taunting her.

Every now and again her eyes would fall to look at the door. There was no lock.

As Evander had closed the door behind him, Hermione had stood still, her ears pricked, waiting to hear the telltale move of metal or soft press of wards. Neither came. When several minutes passed and the reality of what was happening dawned on her Hermione bit her lip so hard she drew blood.

_What if she?_

Hermione balled her fists, her fingernails creating welts in the soft flesh of her palm.

She couldn't hurt him. It wouldn't happen again.

_Would it?_

* * *

Hermione made it through the first night hovering within the margins of a restless sleep, her skin sweat soaked and her throat raw from the brutal force of her impassioned screams.

When she woke from the pitiful slumber, her eyes stung. Despite the heavy curtains light still leaked into the room, white-yellow shards crept in through every unguarded crevice. It was such a bizarre sensation to see the trails, to know for certain it was the morning after so long in timeless darkness.

Hermione gently climbed out of bed, mindful of her sore limbs. She was used to it by now. In the night she gave herself over to the whims of her fragile mind as she was rendered a powerless puppet against the contortions that were racked from her body. Gingerly she sat on the carpeted floor, in front of the window, twisting her arms as the light danced patterns over her grey flesh.

Hermione must have been there for hours lost to blankness, before she realised the door, that sat within the far wall, opened from her side. If she wanted. She wasn’t sure why it unnerved her so much. Freedom was such a tantalising concept, or at least it had been once. When her own had been threatened as a child, she had done all she could to protect what had seemed like a fundamental ideal, something worth dying for. Now? Now Hermione wondered if she had finally found the only freedom she was ever likely to have at the prison. The freedom to not chose, the freedom to follow a prescribed routine.

Then she had given it all up.

She supposed she had made that choice, though, whether in her own self-interest was not yet clear.

It was enough to compel her to stand in front of the door for a time, tracing its simple carved panel in her mind, her eyes slinking up and down as she took in the deep grain that was still visible beneath the heavily applied varnish. It wasn’t much of a barrier, locked or not. Her mind whispered that she should be in a cage, far away from human life. Hermione shut the thoughts away and silently leant forward to grip the ornate yet tasteful handle, pressing on it quickly and stepping into the corridor before she could change her mind.

Hermione didn't have time to be overwhelmed for as soon as her feet crossed the threshold of her room an elf appeared, popping up in front of her and giving a little curtsey. “Miss will follow me, for breakfast,” the elf said before taking off, not waiting for an answer.

Hermione did as she was bidden, walking more briskly than she had for a long time to keep up with the elf’s exuberant steps. If she shut her eyes, she could imagine that a guard was leading her. But even with closed eyes, she knew there was no suppression around her neck, no harsh words in her ear, or spittle on her cheek.

She thought that should have been comforting.

* * *

Hermione stood by the array of breakfast foods impassively and tried to make a choice. After a few moments of indecision, she raised her hand, letting it hover over the offerings on the table as if something would magically rise into her palm. Stranger things had happened.

It was a simple thing really, all she had to do was pick something, but Hermione couldn’t remember the last time she had.

As Evander walked into the small room behind her Hermione felt her shoulders sag; there was a relief in having something other than making the choice in front of her to do. She turned to look at him as he approached the table, standing a little distance away. Evander looked better than he had the night before, he was wearing simple clothes, all of them black, but the darkness of the colour against his pale skin made his appearance incredibly striking. He had clearly done something with his hair, having cut away the mass of tangles that had once fallen around his neck, but he had left it long at the front, brushed to the side, so the dark mop of fringe that remained fell in front of one of his eyes.

Evander moved to stand a little closer to her as Hermione continued her assessment and her hand, the one that had been outstretched to hover over the breakfast trays moved to his fringe. He remained still as the newly cut ends prickled against Hermione’s fingertips before she brushed them over his cheekbone.

Sharp, she thought with a flash of memory. Sharp and yet so very beautiful.

After a time Hermione twisted back to face the table and the reprieve she had felt while encased within his shadow slipped away.

Evander perused the offering quickly before picking up a grapefruit, cutting it in half, and placing both pieces onto an ornate plate. Hermione watched his fingers as they moved, graceful pureblood elegance at its finest.

Apparently sensing the reason for her lack of movement Evander pointed his head in the direction of his plate and Hermione sighed, endlessly gratefully as he interpreted her slight sound as acceptance and moved to take another piece of the fruit, cutting it and placing on a plate for her.

When they had taken seats Hermione’s eyes rested on the vibrant pink innards of one half as she methodically consumed the other. The almost forgotten bitterness danced across the back of her tongue as her fingers grew wet with juice.

The next day, when she made it to breakfast, she picked herself another.

* * *

Hermione moved around a little that first week, some old sense of herself motivating her to sketch out a mental blueprint of the house she was now confined to.

She quickly found that space was everywhere, and it panicked Hermione in the same way that confinement would have done years before. It wasn’t just that the manor was vast, or that she had seemingly free run of the many rooms, it was that she was on her own, truly on her own, for the first time in… she couldn’t remember. The last few months had seen her accompanied everywhere; now she roamed without a constant direction.

Hermione avoided the larger rooms; there was something unsettling about them. Whether they were filled with too many ghosts of the past or whether they triggered her own she couldn't be sure. She had taken a few tentative steps into the main ballroom early in her exploration, and the echo of her movements had her retreating to the safety of the doorway in seconds. She wondered if Evander felt the same. Their meals were set out in a little breakfast nook instead of in one the many rooms she had discovered that were better suited to the purpose.

They’d had space, her and Ron, in that little house. Not as much as they may have wanted, not so much as they needed, but space. Maybe, if they'd had more it would never have happened, maybe they would never have got to that point. Her mind scoffed. Bigger rooms wouldn't have made her less broken.

* * *

While ‘hiding out’ at the manor could hardly have been considered a real return to reality, it did mean that Hermione had to face aspects of existence that she hadn’t had to think about while rotting away in prison. Trying to eat was a chore of insane magnitude. She casually thought to herself that hunting down bits of Voldemort's soul might have been easier. Up to now, she had never had to try, her movements while incarcerated had been mechanical, eat a little of the slop that gets chucked down and hope they won't throw the remains at you.

Trying to eat food, good food, meant trying to live.

_Was that what she was doing?_

Hermione hadn't thought about the future ramifications when she provided the means for the escape, for once she had sunk deep into the comforting understanding that she wasn’t expected to be the one to make the decision. She merely alerted Evander to the possibility and let the rest decide what to do with it.

_Had she been looking to start a new life? Hermione didn’t think so._

Maybe she just wanted a prettier venue for death, though that too seemed unlikely, she had never been overly sold on the poetry of aesthetics. Though she liked the windows.

* * *

Evander paced the halls of his childhood home to occupy his time, the lack of established routine after so many years of either incarceration or servitude was eating at his mind. The plan, if they could call their faintly sketched outline that had made it all seem simple. They would stay at the manor for a while, and once the heat had calmed, as much as it ever would, they would start again somewhere. Change who they were.

It meant there was little to do now and that feeling of idleness was corroding his calm. Feelings Evander never had to deal with in prison, settled as he had been to ending his days there, came back like a tidal wave, lashing so firmly against the walls in his mind that he occasionally blacked out from the force of the assault.

So much bitterness channelled in his body, his reflection, cleaned up and filling out, a harsh reminder of the past. His very bones a conduit for the bad decisions and greed of his father.

_How much we are empty shells, our bodies mere vessels for our souls. What happens to those that have their conscious selves wrenched from within only to have them shoved back without warning?_

_What happens when that soul no longer feels contained within the previously abandoned flesh?_

Evander wanted to seek out his little bird, wherever she was hiding in this big house. He could hear her sometimes, her soft-footed explorations as she mapped out the place in her mind. He wondered if Hermione knew she had sought out all the exits on her first day? He hadn’t replicated her path, but only because he already knew where they were.

Evander wanted to give her a guided tour, of a kind, to press his hand to her lower back gently and open doors so she could look inside, holding onto the frames if it made her feel better. But she was adjusting; they were adjusting. He was used to seeing her once a week, all the while knowing she was on the same rock but not catching sight of her. He didn’t want to overwhelm her, or himself. So he kept his appearances limited to breakfast, sometimes dinner.

Hermione had fallen back; he could see the progress that he had reached in and almost dragged out of her was slipping away. For once Evander wasn't sure that what they had done was the right thing. She could let herself die here he realised. It would never have been allowed in prison, not before her time anyway.

But here she could totally withdraw, she could climb completely into her own head and let her body perish.

 _Was it cruel to let a person you care for_ drown _themselves in nothingness, without offering a hand or a word, a life raft for them to escape the turbulent sea of their suffering?_

_Was it worse to intervene, to wrench them into blinding light when all they wished for was to remain submerged?_

* * *

During the day Hermione traipsed around the manor, making lists in her mind of the objects she found, counting the number of windows, the number of stairs, how many teacups there were at breakfast. At night there were no words, no comforting numbers or objects. Her nights were given over to screams, incomprehensible noises that would be dragged from her body; her chest arched from the too soft mattress, contorted in unnatural shapes as if she had been possessed.

She wondered, as she laid, covered in slick sweat and the blood that she had drawn from her soft skin, she wondered if it was the prison that did that to them. Had the desolate landscape imprinted the sense of terror so deep within them that it fractured their psyche? Or did the crumbling rocks merely strip away the facade that they had been walking around with before? Had her stay there merely uncovered the cracks that she had been masking for years?

Hermione didn’t know. All she could say for certain was that the dreams were getting worse, or maybe the images were just harder to shake off. When she awoke from a dream while within the prison walls the sight of the trails of water and the sounds of the scratching rodents that lined the walls was somehow comforting. She had been where she deserved to be. Whatever pain she had inflicted on the world it was now throwing it back at her.

Hermione rose up from the soft bed and laid down on the wooden floor.


	5. Chapter 5

Routine had always been important to Hermione. When she had started school, even as far back as Muggle primary, it was how she organised her time, how she made sure that she stayed on top of everything. When life had become difficult, for want of a better word to describe the crushing fear that pervaded every waking second, her reliance on the semblance of calm that procedure brought became more and more essential. Even in the darkest of moments, being able to exert some surface level control over her existence had been grounding. Hermione had found a way to bring order to the most chaotic periods, so she supposed it was no surprise that she had eventually been able to establish the same while living in Evander’s family home.

The world outside the relative safety of the manor was as hostile as ever. That in itself was no real adjustment, after spending so many years at war, peace, what little experience Hermione had of it, had never really settled in as a lasting concept. Having a regular job and a home had not stopped her for continually looking over her shoulder, those things were now hard engrained. She didn’t respond to the hair trigger impulses anymore, but they still lingered, twitching at the surface of her skin.

Hermione’s new world was made up of walls and locks in the same way that every other place she had inhabited had been, and just like all those that had gone before there were restrictions on movements in and out ‘for her own safety’.

In many ways, Hermione knew she could expedite the current stage of her despondency, her slow walk towards nothingness, by simply opening the front door. She was sure that in the open there would be no shortage of people who would assist her and yet, something held her back.

So she existed, as much as she could allow herself each day. She got up, sometimes she even washed, and she moved about the large home finding little nooks and hidey holes where she could get comfortable for a few hours. She tried to concentrate on the passing of time, assessing whether she thought it moved quicker here than in prison, it seemed to. Maybe not as fast as when she was at Hogwarts, but it certainly felt accelerated. Hermione didn’t know what that meant.

She was sitting in one of her favourite spots when Evander found her, perched neatly on a tastefully embroidered window seat in front of a large arch of fine glass that looked out onto a rather formal courtyard.

“What are you watching?” he asked as he spotted her determined gaze, coming to a stop beside her. He wasn’t close enough to touch and yet he was near enough that Hermione felt like the weight of his presence was distorting the air around her.

“The light,” she replied softly, one finger tapping where her hand had come to rest against the pane.

Words came out a little easier now than they had before, it didn’t startle her to hear her voice quite as much as it had in the beginning. They had been trying for a little more conversation lately, if it could be called that, they exchanged so few words. Hermione simply sought to do more than mumble her greetings in the morning and every day it felt like a little bit less effort, last week she had even addressed him first.

It seemed to make Evander happy, not that it was obvious, he showed almost as little outward sign of emotion as Hermione. Though, even if he wasn’t the grinning kind, she could sense contentment in the softening of his eyes or the relaxed position of his shoulders. It made him look younger. Something about his new ease made Hermione feel an echo of his happiness, in the centre of her chest, a reflection of sorts. It took her longer to come to terms with being responsible for a positive shift in someone else's mood; it was something she hadn't thought was within her power anymore. So, she tried a little harder; it seemed the least she could do. They were hardly up all night discussing the philosophy of existence, but it was… a start.

Evander didn’t seem surprised by her answer, and Hermione smiled, albeit internally. The lack of constant explanation was soothing. He looked out past her, his eyes roving over the landscape before he turned his head to hers slightly. “Could I borrow you for a moment?”

Hermione tore her face away from tracking the way the light danced in the water pooled beneath the marble fountains and nodded once, flexing her feet slightly as she pulled them from underneath herself and fell into step beside him.

Evander had begun to appear now and again as their days confined together continued. He had always been there at breakfast and sometimes dinner, but now he was present whenever she ate, and he had begun showing up in all manner of places during the day. Hermione got the impression that he had been holding himself back, and as much as she had wanted to be near him she was grateful, she had needed the space. Now though? Now it just felt nice to walk next to someone.

He was taller than her, which in itself wasn’t something to be remarked upon, most men in her life had been, but she never felt intimidated by his height. His form cast a shadow more formidable than the man himself appeared and standing within its shade made Hermione feel, something.

_Like the protective blanket that the house cast over the delicate flowers in the gardens come nightfall, she felt the dark wing of his shadow fall over her so clearly that she could have sworn the feathers touched her cheek._

As much as Hermione had come to rely on Evander’s presence as a kind of life raft inside the prison, he had become something more on the outside. Simply, she enjoyed his company. Somehow the quiet man managed to treat her like spun glass but at the same time never made her feel like he was handling her. He never touched her unless he was already in her line of vision, he spoke in muted tones, but he never kerbed what he wanted to say. At least, she didn't think he did.

Hermione wordlessly followed Evander to a room on the other side of the house to hers, all the while taking steady comfort in the whooshing noise that his trousers made, or the faint clip of his boots against the polished floors before they walked into a large, richly furnished bedroom. It didn't take long for Hermione to conclude that it was his room. There were gleaming artefacts neatly arranged in even rows on almost every surface and a small table by the side of the bed that was covered in parchment pages filled with line upon line of his artful scribble. Hermione had seen some of it already, Evander was not a brooding artist type, he left poetry, in all stages of completeness, all over the house and was never reluctant for her to look at it.

It didn’t dawn on Hermione for a long while why she might have been brought there; her eyes swept over the room continually and each time she seemingly missed the obvious, the twin beds that had been set up in the middle of the room. Maybe it hadn’t struck her earlier because the setup was like so many of the hotel rooms she had been booked into when travelling as a Muggle, perhaps it was because it was exactly the sort of eccentricity she associated with pureblood life but suddenly the obvious explanation filtered into her mind and she began to back away shaking her head.

Evander must have transfigured them, or maybe he had instructed the elves to bring in another, either way, he had been thinking about this for a while. He wasn’t an impulsive man.

Evander didn’t reach for her as she moved further back. He made no move to grab her, showed no signs that he would plead for her to stay. In fact, he stayed completely still, staring at her until she looked back at him.

“Slow,” he said calmly, and against her better judgement, Hermione felt her heart rate relax in her chest.

In the previous weeks, Hermione had gotten whatever sleep she could before she walked around the deserted house as little more than a ghost. When the elves asked her how she was she replied that she was fine, sometimes she varied it a little, to make it seem more polite, but the lack of heartfelt belief remained the same. She had thought it would be convincing enough.

Evander had never asked. She knew now that she should have taken that as a warning.

Hermione should have remembered that just because Evander didn’t say anything didn't mean he didn't know. He wasn’t like her, and her friends had been, in a time that seemed so many years before. When Hermione, old Hermione, had been apprised of the suffering of her friends she would have charged to them, all guns blazing, determined to find the answers, to make it better, as they would have done for her. But Evander was not a foolish, headstrong child; he played his cards closer to his chest than that. He played to carry his point, to win.

Still, Hermione should have known that he would know. When she nodded at him in the morning, and he carried on with his breakfast after quietly eyeing the heavy bags under her eyes, she should have suspected. The house was huge, but the prison had been bigger, and there he’d had fewer means at his command, and yet he had still known about her nightmares, all the Death Eaters had, that was why Travers approached her after all.

Evander shifted slightly on his feet, drawing her attention back to him as he moved to sit on the end of one of the beds. Making himself smaller?

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he offered sincerely, and Hermione laughed, the sound shocked out of her from his choice of words. The airy mirthless sound that came from her caked on the walls around them, it slid and weighed down all of their good intentions and Hermione gritted her teeth and balled her fists, clenching her arms to her sides.

She could see the moment realisation dawned on his face and his eyes widened before he stepped towards her.  
“You're not going to hurt me, Hermione.”

“You don’t know that,” she whispered, and that time she did start. Those were words she wished would climb back into her throat. She remembered now, how ugly they could be, especially when you couldn’t control them. Noises, that was all speech was, and yet it had the power to wound so deeply.

Evander looked at her, his face challenging, “I know you never killed anyone in their sleep.” His voice was so definite, so unwavering; he shook his head before he stood again, still maintaining a distance. “I’ll never lay a hand on you in anger.”

Hermione wondered later when she was reluctantly tucked under a new set of covers, staring at the pale light reflecting off Evander’s cheekbones how long it had been since he had made a promise that he intended to keep.

It didn’t matter, intentions never did. People always broke their vows in the end.

She watched him as his breathing slowed and the barely there twitch in his foot settled.

She slept fitfully, but she did not scream.

* * *

Now that the weather had begun to brighten Hermione had started extending her adventures to include the gardens. There were formal courtyards and even an attempt at a haphazard shrubbery, but even there everything felt too contrived. It was the fields Hermione liked best. She could hardly have been called an educated appreciator of the outdoors, one grassy bank all looked the same to her, and there inlaid their appeal.

Laying her head down on the dewy grass she could have been in the back garden at Burrow, if she closed her eyes tight enough she could almost hear Ginny chastising her brothers as they cheated in the pickup Quidditch match someone would have initiated.

If she stood in a shady patch of trees, she could be in the Forest of Dean, hiding behind an aged trunk while her dad counted to a hundred.

Just as she had done with the interior, Hermione mentally mapped the grounds, counting the flower beds and assessing the exits. She had found the large wrought iron back gates, and they had become a point of fascination for her. Hermione often stood before them after walking along the boundary line of the great house, and her eyes would zero in on the key that was always left in the lock. She had comprehended the notion that she was free, to a certain extent, and yet she still felt out of balance whenever she faced evidence of it.

Hermione simply didn't understand. The urge to flee was absent.

Flight had been a prevailing emotion for as long as she could remember, starting from the blanket of time she referred to as before. It had always been there then. She may not have acted on it, she may have pushed it to the back of her mind determined to fight standing shoulder to shoulder with those she loved, but it was still there.

It had started as a low thrum while they were searching out the Horcruxes, a bubble of anxiety that would begin in her mind as an image of what her life could have been. Run away, be anonymous, have no one depend on you, be free. Hermione would burst it quickly, but the stain of the thought would linger.

Now as she moved about the halls, as a different kind of fugitive, she should have wanted to flee more than ever, but she didn't.

She stopped going to look at the gates when she realised that her reluctance to test them was down to more than having nowhere else to go.

* * *

At some point Evander had apparently decided that lurking around in corridors was not how he wanted to spend his time and so he made an effort to pull Hermione into some of the bigger rooms, idly talking about the paintings or some such thing until they settled into familiar quiet.

Today they had gone into the library a room that Hermione had observed from the doorway many times, but she had never lingered. Nothing felt like it was no longer a part of her life more than a library. It was overwhelming in a way, the choice. They were a world away from a rickety trolley.

She ran her fingers over the neatly ordered leather-bound spines and wondered if she would ever feel the same level of almost unexplainable joy that she had when she was a child. Probably not. She knew now that the answers to her problems weren't contained within their pages.

For once it wasn’t the night it had all gone wrong that had ruined this aspect of her life. The erosion of joy had happened before, on the Horcrux hunt. Hermione had grown to loathe the continuous desperate pouring through the tomes, had grown to resent the innocent parchment pages almost as much as she had the vagueness of the instructions they had received.

She meandered down a darkened aisle as Evander pointed to a far wall before disappearing. Hermione reviewed the titles idly, unemotionally. When was the last time she read for pleasure? Not in desperation, not to live, or to be the best, to fit in, just simple to enjoy it? Had she ever?

In the little house, there was no room for a library; such a thing seemed like an extravagance. So as a consequence there were books piled everywhere, doing little more than gathering dust. Hermione wanted to store them somewhere, somewhere she wouldn't constantly be reminded of her reticence, but there was nowhere, so they stayed in the higgledy piggeldy piles... waiting.

_Ron hated the books._

_“We’re not at school anymore Hermione,” he would grumble as he tripped over a recently moved stack._

_“No,” Hermione would reply, the light diminishing from her eyes, “we are not.”_

Hermione walked past all of the textbooks with little interest until she reached the back of the room and a very unexpected fiction section. The shelves were wondrously stocked, a quick glance showing how the books that seemed to fill every available space were obviously well loved, cracked spines and the odd dog-eared page were everywhere.

Hermione grazed the stacks with the tips of her fingers, this time with a little more interest, this time she was looking for something. Three scanned shelves later, and she pulled a book clad in a soft blue canvas into her hands and walked off to find Evander.

He wasn’t far. He had sat on the floor, despite the comfortable chairs that were scattered everywhere, his long legs out in front of him and his head back against the wall, he was clearly waiting for her, but his face showed no agitation. He looked up as she approached and Hermione folded herself down next to him, pressing the newly chosen book into his fingers in silent question.

“My mother,” he said in the slightly wistful tone he always had when he spoke of her. It told Hermione at once that the woman was not only long gone but that he had loved her very much. Evander pulled up his knees, resting the book against his thighs and Hermione drank in his silence as he leafed through her offering, his face betraying how he was trapped in a memory that she couldn't determine the pleasantness of. She wasn’t sure what compelled her to do it, but she found herself laying her head against his shoulder as she tapped her finger against the title page he was glancing at.

Evander looked down at her one eyebrow slightly raised. “She liked grand, sweeping tales of romance and misunderstanding, angst and reprisals,” he explained.

“She was a romantic?” Hermione asked, she wasn’t sure why it should be such a surprise. Most of the pureblood courtships she had heard of sounded like little more than business transactions but she knew she was looking at them through the eyes her Muggle upbringing had given her. By contrast most of the girls she went to school with that had been married off in that way had felt more like princesses in their own story.

Evander stilled, just a small fraction, she might not have felt it if her cheek hadn’t been pressed against him. Hermione made to pull away, but Evander moved quicker, securing his fingers around her wrist and gently tugging her back.

“I think so, but a practical one. Mother enjoyed the stories, but she was wasn’t the type to throw herself off a tower through love lost,” he said dryly. “I suppose the books were an escape of a kind, though why I can’t fathom. Why would you yearn to leave a locked cell only to relocate to a room with a closed door?”

“It’s Muggle,” she said eventually turning her gaze back to the book.

Evander turned it over in his fingers. “I’m not sure she knew the difference, and in any case, my father obviously didn’t, otherwise they wouldn’t have been here.” He opened the cover again and ran his fingers over the parchment until he found a page that was folded over, Hermione almost tutted at the practice, and Evander’s eyes sparkled at her.

“It was one of her favourites.”

“Will you read it to me?” She had missed his voice; he hadn’t read to her since they had escaped the prison. She had needed it then, had held onto his calmness when all around her was fractured glass but the compulsion was different now, it wasn’t need, it was want.

Evander settled back against the wall securing her wrist he was holding so that her arm draped across his lap allowing him to hold the volume in his other hand.

“The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I loved her nonetheless because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection.”[1]

Hermione had read the book before; Great Expectations was the sort of thing that English school girls read, even if she hadn’t been an entirely typical school girl. She reflected as she shut her eyes, so she could focus on the shifting emotions in Evander’s voice that although she had read it she had never absorbed the story, she had never lived through it, felt it within her chest.

It made her think of her mother, another woman who had a fondness for the great works of romantic fiction. Jean Granger had explained to her once that although she loved Pride and Prejudice, so much so that she could have practically recited it from memory, she was more captivated by Jane Eyre. Darcy’s love was pure and unwavering, it flouted social convention, and it showed his true appreciation for a beautifully flawed heroine. Rochester’s love was darker, it was selfish, possessive and all consuming. Darcy, upon meeting Elizabeth, changed, his worldview shifted, he became a better man. Rochester remained the same; there was no casual softening of his harder side, he clung to Jane as if their hold on each other was the only thing that kept his feet rooted to the earth.

Hermione glanced up as Evander turned the page, unlike the mercurial Lord of the manor in that story he had no craggy visage or bad humoured bark to warn her off. His face was porcelain, his angles making him look younger than his years and yet lingering in the back of his eyes she could see the same propensity to devour and just like Jane instead of running, like she should have done, she remained quiet at the gates of hell.

* * *

Hermione slept next to him now, or at least, in a bed next to his. The sheets the elves had put on that day were in a pattern that matched, and if he squinted his eyes and angled his head till he could barely see the gap, it made it look as if the duvet that was pulled up under her pale face was the same one that was resting against his skin.

Before now Evander had found himself wandering the empty corridors at night, drawn to stand outside her room. After weeks of giving her space he hadn't been able to hold himself back any longer. Maybe he should have done, maybe that would have been respecting her wishes, but he had never claimed to be without self-interest.

_The magpie roams the skies for food or for learning and sometimes, simply to indulge in the inexplicable need to seek out things that sparkle. Treasure found the bird would bring the object back to his nest where it might look at it, enjoy its mirrored surfaces and sharp edges._

_Nothing in all my travels has ever caught the light quite like you._

He had never heard her screams in prison, though he had heard about them. Hearing them here, within the walls of his childhood home had brought forth the avenging angel that lingered beneath his calm exterior. Evander had to grip the doorframe to her room so tightly that his hands bled, it was just enough to stop himself from crashing in there. He knew it wouldn't do her any good to be startled awake from such a dream, but logic rarely stopped his stronger impulses.

It was only that she wasn’t under any form of attack that kept him sane. The only thing she was under siege from was herself, and he had promised he would never hurt her, and he had meant it.

He could at least look at her now without a door in the way, she was quieter in his room. Her sleep almost seemed peaceful at times. She no longer contorted when the darkness came for her but her face twitched, her eyelids fluttered like hummingbird wings, beating out a barely there rhythm against the pale freckles that scattered across her nose and above her cheeks. Her hands would wind into the plush softness of the comforter, and her face would pinch.

Like comfort was a burden.

Evander whispered to her in her sleep, words he wouldn’t let himself voice during the day. Not that their silence irritated him in any way. He found there was almost something prideful in it, a sign that they didn't need to speak to understand each other. It made everyone else an outsider, placing him on the inside of something for one of the first times in his life.

"I have not bestowed my tenderness anywhere. I have never had any such thing." [1] he recited into the quiet of the room. “Until you.”

What a change it was in his outlook to have something to protect again, something pure. Her light seemed to shine into the darkened shadows of his mind, reminding him of what he was beneath the shroud.

“You did that Hermione,” he whispered as the sun crept into the room and she reactively twisted in the covers draped over her.

* * *

Hermione got more fragments now, pictures like stills from full memories would come back, and she would try to slide them into place.

_Adjusting a red striped tie._

_Lines that brought back words of blood._

_The tallest Christmas tree she had ever seen, branches weighted with_ charmed _decoration._

_Holding a mirror and darting around corners._

_Sitting cross-legged on a bathroom floor, peering over a steaming cauldron._

Somedays if Evander had been reading to her when the pictures would rush to the front of her mind they would be accompanied by a feeling, some echo of whatever Evander had made her feel. The rush of emotion made it easier to remember.

* * *

After weeks of putting it off, Evander opened up his father’s study. He had allowed himself the reprieve before now, telling himself Hermione was the priority, and she was, but he had never anticipated coming back here, and there were things he needed to face before he left it for good.

He had to use a shoulder to ‘encourage’ the door to open, too many years of the wood expanding and contracting in the painted frame making it stick. The air in the once imposing room was musty, some of the paintings sun damaged and yet it all looked largely the same as he remembered. This room was the setting for some of the strongest memories of his childhood, and like all things it had seemed so much bigger then.

He could remember standing in there, when his head had barely come above the large desk, listening to his father’s preaching about duty and honour, it wasn’t long after that that Eoghan Avery had given up his attempts at guidance. His father had moaned at dinner how Evander was nothing like the son he expected, nothing like the one he needed to continue the family name. Evander supposed he should have felt ashamed, or even scared, but all he felt was hatred.

He pulled open one of the faded drapes and leant back against the wall. He wasn’t sure why he felt he needed to do this, it wasn’t as if he intended to use the space for his own, and he certainly wasn’t keeping the furnishings in situ out of any misplaced sentimentality.

_Logical Muggles say that ghosts do not exist, everything I have learnt suggests that in their world that is true. Ghosts of the past, however, whether in the magical world or not, they linger in plain sight._

There would have been a time when Evander would have loved the thought of beheading the king and sitting behind his desk, his throne. Now though he knew that his father had been right, to a some degree. He didn't belong there.

Eoghan Avery was a proud man, governed like so many of his generation, by the scriptures of pureblood etiquette and what they dictated regarding being a Head of House. For all of his ideals his interpretation of them had separated him from his wife and son, he lived by those rules in the letter but not in spirit, upholding a public face and keeping his more dissolute actions to the shadows. It was arrogance that had made his father the type of man that he was, he believed himself to be so superior and all because he was born into a role and then played the part because he believed he had ticked off all of the boxes on some metaphorical list. It had made Eoghan self-centred and therefore blinded. He simply couldn’t understand those who weren’t like him.

Evander’s fingers trailed over long forgotten objects, and his thoughts wandered to Hermione. He had a moment's smugness when he imagined what his father would have thought of her, but he pushed the thought away quickly. For all of this father’s appreciation of fine things he would never have understood the hollow shadow Evander was letting carve herself into him,

Eoghan Avery was an intelligent man, but he only looked surface level and the only one reaction to things he didn't understand, that was to destroy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1] Quotes taken from the beautiful Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Big thanks to Kreeblim Sabs who worked with me to find the right book to make this scene work.


	6. Chapter 6

Hermione had known it would only be a matter of time before she came face to face with one of her fellow escapees again. She supposed she was thankful that the first one who came to her notice was Travers. She wasn’t sure how long it had been since they had stood together on the jagged rocks, time was something that she was becoming better with, but tracking the passing of days, or knowing how many had dawned since they left the prison, it wasn’t something she held in her grasp.

Hermione was called into one of the smaller sitting rooms by an enthusiastic elf who bounced along her side as moved through the now familiar corridors. She didn’t question his sudden appearance, by now she had grown accustomed to them dragging her about the place, and had assumed it must have been time for another meal. The excitable little elf at her heels seemed younger than Fig, the elf who seemed to have appointed himself head of her care, and she zoned out most of the high pitched chatter until they reached a doorway and he called her lady, dropping into a deep bow, which made her wince. Only in this world of etiquette, she thought to herself, Hermione could never quite understand the pomp and circumstance the tiny creatures seemed to think appropriate for fugitives with more than a little blood on their hands.

She supposed it should have been slightly shocking to find Travers encased in one of the highback chairs but Hermione’s step didn’t falter as she moved into the centre of the room and sat opposite him, taking the tea he proffered. Somewhere in her mind, her awareness prickled, they were drawing closer.

As he busied himself making his own beverage, Hermione looked the Death Eater over. Travers had appeared almost unaffected by his time in the prison, at least on the outside. It seemed ridiculous to say that incarceration looked good on him, but the opposite certainly wasn't the case. She couldn't speak for what went on inside his mind, though he had never shown any real sign of damage there either. Sat in front of her now, apparently at ease, cleaned up and restyled he seemed almost carefree.

Louis’ dark brown hair was cut back neatly, the subtle light in the room highlighting the deep tone of his face. He looked good Hermione realised, though she didn't know when he had become Louis in her mind. She imagined it was a question she would be asking herself regularly in time to come. When did they all become people? For the man in front of her, it must have happened somewhere between Occlumency lessons and the day that he had stood behind her during the guards taunting.

Travers hadn’t said a word that day, had just dropped his hand on the back of her chair, his fingers so close Hermione had almost felt their warmth through the back of her slim prison garb. It had been that partial heat she had focused on while that guard spat at her, and the shadow that he had cast over she felt protected by when their eyes grew glinted.

Hermione pulled herself from her memories, turning herself slightly so she could glance out of the window. The light was calming; it reminded her of where she was. There were no windows in prison, there had been no gardens in the little cottage, there had been no peace in the tent.

Her breathing slowed.

When she eventually turned back around to face ‘her guest’, it was to find that Louis had produced a book from somewhere and was idly flicking through the pages in much the same way she had seen patients do in her parent’s dental practise waiting room, killing time before their appointment. Neither bored or absorbed, patiently waiting.

His relaxed manner itched at Hermione’s mind, observations she didn't want filtering in. She imaged he had been here before, possibly even recently; he had probably been expected today, though Evander had been nowhere to be seen all morning. Could he really have come to see her? And if so for what purpose?

It was absurd, to be sat around having tea and crumpets in silence, both of them killers, and yet the air between them was as calm as Hermione had felt for a long time.

She was reflecting on being with another person, other than Evander, when Louis suddenly spoke, placing his book aside and steepling his fingers.

“How are you?” he asked, his voice betraying some small emotion, he seemed to genuinely care about the reply.

Hermione was startled into silence, how was she? She had no idea. She was never asked, so she had nothing prepared. Evander never asked. Somewhere something niggled in the back of her mind that that was a bad thing, but she shut it down quickly. Evander didn't ask because he knew.

He always knew.

* * *

Hermione continued to feel as if she was re-emerging from deep water as the days went by. At times she could feel an almost physical weight pressing on the tops of her shoulders if she had been in anyway spiritual she might have thought of the pressure as her penance, the weight of her wrongdoing destined to be forced upon her for the rest of her earthbound days. Sometimes Hermione felt like she had made it far enough for her feet to gain purchase on the ground, then suddenly without warning it would be as if the tide was stronger again and she would be unceremonially swept back to where she started.

On days where she felt more stable, Hermione pushed herself to remember, and with practice and concentration, things began to come back clearer. She asked the elves for some paper, vaguely startling them by giving her first request for anything since Evander had brought her there, and they had happily delivered more reams than she could ever use in one lifetime.

Hermione sat cross-legged on the floor, carefully taking two sheets and folding them on themselves, ripping along the edges till she had a stack of small rectangles that she placed out in front of herself, focusing on their blankness. Slowly, deliberately, she picked up one turning it over in her fingers before neatly drawing a small icon on its surface, a few flicks of her quill, before dropping it back on the floor and repeating the process again and again.

A different rectangle, a different image, something to make them less plain, something to give them meaning, something to anchor her onto the floor along with them.

A tiny crescent moon obscured by clouds, a tarnished crown bereft of jewels, a weatherbeaten leaf holding firm.

One by one they took on life until half the cards were full.

Hermione added to them from time to time, eventually pulling out a piece of fresh parchment to add to the deck. On days where she could face it, Hermione sat down on the floor and arranged them in a haphazard circle around her, sitting quietly as she turned looking at each one in turn. She could remember days when the thought of such a border would have given her comfort, when the flesh and blood that the images represented would have been standing alongside her, so tightly pressed against each other that they bumped shoulders.

Though, it was not a ring of protection anymore, they no longer stood next to her in support, but above her in judgement, just like at her trial.

_Hermione walked into the courtroom her bound hands in front of her; she kept her eyes focused on the fastenings as she was lowered into her seat. The stern bite of metal prevented her from pushing back the hair that had fallen into her face; it later turned out to be something of a blessing, the mass of messy curls obscured so many of the sneering faces from her line for vision._

_Hermione was used to disapproval, she had seen similar looks from people before, but back then they would have caused her chin to rise, she would have been defiant, she would have met their scorn with contempt, daring them to hate her. Those people had loathed her for what she was, for what she represented, for the disturbance she caused to their content system of beliefs._

_Now, people that had once loved her looked upon her as if they had borrowed the faces of repugnance that she remembered from her youth, only, theirs were not for who she was, it was for what she had done._

_The trial took three days, Hermione’s chin stayed down._

* * *

Evander took a swig from the amber filled glass he was gripping and glanced about the room. The rest of the escapee contingent, his marked brothers, had been coming and going for the last week, though this was the first time that most of them had been in the same room at the same time. It had been a long time since they all looked as well as they did at present, for some of them not since the Dark Lord’s return, for others, not since his first fall.

_An irony that when we are finally given the opportunity to indulge in the freedom and folly of the youth that we missed out on, it is at a time when we have long since stopped being deserving of it._

By accident or possibly through strategic decisions the best of those that were left towards the end were here, in his opinion at least. Evander was sure many of those that had stood in even circles before their Lord would have different views on the hierarchy than he did, but that was hardly surprising, he valued different things to most.

They had been discussing their plans for hours, where to go, who to be, the style of the session was so familiar and yet so different. Typically when they would have been in a similar situation, tucked away making plans, there were groupings they all fell into, old allegiance lines that none of them would cross. With so few of them left those things didn't seem important anymore, it made for quicker decisions. When not so occupied with sticking knives in each other’s backs, or one-upping each other for hollow praise, they could openly side with whatever solution had merit and move onto the next hurdle.

It was raised that they should separate, Thorfinn was the one to voice the possibility that the rest of them had talked around. The suggestion laid heavily in the air for a moment until Rabastan dismissed it, his words followed by quick agreement from the rest.

Evander crossed one leg over the other and topped up his drink. The dismissal didn't make sense; it was the most logical thing for them to do, they would be easier noticed by remaining in a large group, though being caught wasn't an option anymore. Evander knew all of them men in the room would be blown to bits before they were pushed back into a cell. They should have agreed to separate to be more sure of avoiding a messy end, and yet none of them, including himself, seemed keen on the idea.

* * *

Hermione sat by Evander from time to time, since their moment in the library they fell back into a pattern they had established what felt like years before. It didn't take him long to read through all of Great Expectations, and Hermione let him be the one to pick the next. She almost felt a smile quirk on her face at the way he would wait now, silently, until she would lower her head on his shoulder and only then would he would begin reading.

When he produced a copy of Paradise Lost Hermione couldn’t have stopped the roll of her eyes for anything in the world. "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven?" She asked as he opened the pages and turned to grin at her.

“No one ever said that the Death Eaters were very original, either in the thirst for power or their choice of imagery,” he defended though he sounded more amused that chastising. Hermione didn’t bother replying, instead, she settled in to listen to the words she had heard the first time so long ago.

She wasn’t sure whether it was her familiarity with the text or that fragments of her mind were beginning to return to her but Hermione noticed something wasn’t right after the first few verses he recited. It took her longer to place her finger on what it was, but soon she was certain. Evander was adding in sections. His voice took on a slightly different tone whenever he did so; it was richer, warmer, more personal. Her first impulse was to claim to herself that she didn’t know what it meant, but though she had never been an expert in matters of the heart she had never been totally blinded to them.

Hermione fought against the stiffening of her spine and the gasp that wanted to crawl out of her throat.

_How long had he been doing this?_

“The mind is its own place, and in itself  
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.  
Do you look at the life that you have now and see existence where freedom stands?  
Do you reflect back on your time in darkness and believe that you were living in the light?”

Hermione shut her eyes and dropped her head against Evander's chest, quietening her breathing until she could feel the beats of his heart increase. She hoped it was enough affirmation for now. For the first time, she wished that one day she would be capable of more.

* * *

Hermione began to find that her walks around the house, even when including the grounds, were no longer satisfying her. She needed something, an occupation of a kind, her fingers twitched as she walked, even as she knew her mind wasn’t settled enough to read.

Somehow she found herself following one of the tiny scurrying elves into the kitchen, an area she hadn’t yet been, apparently interrupting a hub of activity. At one end of a large scrubbed wooden bench, Fig was overseeing what looked to be a mass production of pastry, with three elves she didn't recognise fully engaged in various stages of the process.

She twisted her hand into her borrowed robes and cleared her throat. “Can I… can I help?” she asked finally.

Hermione was surprised when all the kitchen’s staff suddenly stopped moving, she had assumed they must have seen her when she came in. Fig’s head dropped to the side for a moment, eyeing her speculatively before he began issuing a frantic set of orders in a language Hermione didn't understand, the words only discernable as the handing out of tasks by his clear, authoritative manner and ruthlessly pointed finger swaying this way and that. Quicker than Hermione would have believed possible a new station was set up at the end of the line and Fig gave her the task of pressing the mix into balls that would then be stored.

It wasn’t exactly complicated, but it kept her twitching fingers steady, Hermione settled herself in and watched the flour based mix as it stretched out and gained strength, taking a new shape, no longer a mass of useless parts. Hermione dutifully attempted to keep up with the others so she wouldn’t slow the process up, it took a surprising amount of concentration to keep up with their practised skill. She had no idea how long she had been sat there when she mechanically turned to collect the next lump to find they were done, and that the others were already packing away cleaning up the afternoon's mess.

Before she could begin to feel self-conscious, being there without a purpose, Fig steered her towards the sink so Hermione could wash her hands and then towards the door.

“Miss will come back tomorrow,” Fig instructed, without a hint of question.

“I…”

“We is making pasta; you may help.”

“Th-Thank you; I think I would like that.”

Fig nodded curtly, and Hermione walked back to the upper floors surprised to see from the first window that she passed that night had already fallen.

* * *

Evander trailed his fingers over the delicate lace bedspread as he took yet another loop around what had been his mother’s suite. Unlike his father's study, these rooms had remained open, and the elves had done an exemplary job of keeping it in the state that would have been pleasing to her had she still been alive. His mother had liked beautiful things, ornamental and mostly useless she often said it made her look the part by picking up some trinket whenever she went shopping. Though she wasn’t in anyway sentimental about them, she could have thrown the whole lot away if the mood struck.

Evander supposed he should do the same, he would have had to before now if he had married when he was supposed to, this room would have had to be made ready for a new Mistress, yet now it would never welcome such a person, not in his lifetime anyway.

A book still rested on her nightstand, an abused collection of Charms theory and it made him smile to remember her reading it. He had never been sure if his mother was happier when she agreed with what had been written or when she found it lamentable. Evelyn Avery would mutter about how intelligence was useless unless it had application and could have ranted for hours about the impossibility of finding an academic who could make their work readable.

“Knowledge is the only real power Evander, no one can take that away from you,” his mother had said when she had found him in the back of the library the Christmas of his first Hogwarts year. The Yule after he had been sorted into Ravenclaw and came home to face the contempt of his ‘humiliated’ father.

Evander lowered himself to the bed and looked over at the line of china dolls held up in stands along the window ledge, their faces and clothes all immaculate. He had thought the stands cruel as a child, and his mother had smiled at him, her slim pale fingers drifting over the circle of metal.

_“It’s a fact of life Evander that when you are beautiful someone is always desirous of wrapping a fastening around your throat and placing you on a high shelf. After all, no one thinks anything is valuable if it has the misfortune of becoming dirty.”_

A dark shape fell over the doorway, and Evander tore his gaze from the window ledge as Thorfinn entered, raising his eyebrows at the taller man’s knowing look.

“Deciding on what to take?” the blond asked as he dropped into one of the many chairs that were scattered about artfully.

Evander sighed, a hand coming up to brush his jaw. “Convincing myself to leave it all behind.”

Thorfinn nodded, “It’s what she would have preferred.”

“I know,” Evander agreed. Himself and Thorfinn had been close since around his second year, the other boy already in his third, if anything his friend knew his mother almost as well as he did, but the agreement didn’t help his quandary. He wanted something to take, something to remember her by, he certainly hadn’t been able to hold onto anything in all the years he had been incarcerated, and he’d had the brand on his arm as a constant reminder of his father.

Thorfinn coughed slightly, and Evander almost rolled his eyes, subtly had never been his strong suit. “What about the girl?”

Evander took pity on his friend and didn’t bother asking who he was referring to, instead, he thought about the way Hermione had turned up to dinner the evening before, with what was unmistakably smudges of flour lining the long sleeves of her robes and a slight smile on her face. He remembered how she had reached for one of the small pies, putting it on her plate without once looking for his assistance.

“Better,” he replied eventually fiddling with his wand.

“Do you think it’s wise-”

“I don’t care,” Evander interjected with a sigh.

“Look, I know she helped get us out but-”

“But?”

Thorfinn shuffled his feet in front of himself, leaning forward to press his elbows on top of his knees and sucking in a breath. “What if she wakes up one day and decides she wants to come home?”

Evander blinked and paused for just a second. “I’ll convince her to stay.”

The men locked eyes and Evander allowed his oldest friend to see the resolve he felt before the large man sagged. “Fine,” he agreed with a put-upon air he often employed before he stood shaking his shoulder a little, “You always were the most immovable prick when you had your mind set on something.”

“Heart, Thorfinn,” he corrected, once again resting his hand over the soft lace. “Heart.”

* * *

Hermione woke as she normally did, gasping for air with her legs tangled in damp sheets, only now her throat wasn’t raw. Louis had been back to the manor a few times after their weirdly formal first exchange, and they had started practising their Occlumency again, only this time with a bit more peace to allow her to focus. Hermione felt more present during his teachings than she had before and whatever Louis saw when he entered her head didn’t make him look as grave as it once had.

Still half asleep she turned in an effort to get more comfortable only to find she couldn’t, Hermione twisted back around to find that her arm was stretched out over the edge of the bed, linking with Evander’s over the short divide. Usually when they touched he would loop his hand around her wrist but now their fingers were intertwined. Hermione instinctively made to flex her grip and his fingers tightened.

She stilled as Evander blinked awake, looking into her eyes before he followed the path of his arm down to their linked fingers.

“You were having a nightmare,” he explained, his voice coming out as a sleepy rasp. “Your hand stretched out and I held it; when you calmed I tried to move away but you held me tighter.”

Hermione thought she could detect a slightly teasing tone from him but it was difficult to tell with the blanket covering the bottom half of his face. He squeezed her fingers once more before he released her hand and Hermione pulled it back under the covers flexing her elbow slightly where the held position had made it go stiff.

She almost hoped it still hurt in the morning.

* * *

Evander watched Hermione from the doorway to their room as she looked through drawers, she hadn't said what she was searching for since she had found him in the study and brought him there, and he didn’t ask. Instead, he watched her as she flitted about enjoying her rare showing of focused resolve.

She finally seemed to hit upon what she was looking for and her shoulders sagged. When she got back to her feet, she walked over to him slowly, all of her previous frenzies vanished, before she placed the cool metal she was clutching into his hand, pulling on one of the longish tufts of hair in front of her ears.

It had taken the longest time imaginable for her hair to grow out, or maybe it had only seemed that way because he watched her so intently. Evander could still remember that day she walked into the grim shared space, blistered and hacked. He could play back in his mind how she had slumped against the far wall and how as her head had dropped forward he had been able to see patches of scalp that had lead to spikes of rage tearing through him. It still thrummed under his skin but it had begun to fade now that she seemed to become back to herself.

He knew what was in his fingers before he looked down, knew from the way she had stood in front of him her body practically vibrating though her eyes radiated a kind of wary trust that made him want to grip her tightly lest she floated away. He spun the golden coloured scissors in between his fingers and thought about his next move.

The hair on Hermione’s head was no longer the shortest of crops but it was still desperately uneven. Evander had assumed that she would let it grow long again but clearly, that was not the case. The selfish, possessive part of him, the part of him that wanted to climb into her very soul was glad of it. He could see her like this, not the Hermione Granger that the world knew, but what was lying underneath, she felt like his like this.

_Though the road to where we are has been bathed in fire, you carry no mark that I can see._

After a moment's indecision Evander reached for her fingers and held her hand tightly, resisting the urge to pull her towards him, she had shown him how she needed to be comforted.

He initially headed for the bathroom but as his brain whirled he change course, he had never asked Hermione for details about her experience with the guards that day but he could make a few guesses, there were only so many places they could have done what they did without being within sight of anyone.

Evander led Hermione into the library, the largest room that she felt comfortable in, a room as far away from white tiles as it was possible to be. Foregoing the scattered chairs, he softly encouraged her to sit in an open area, directly onto the heavy carpet, immediately falling onto his knees behind her. Their relative positions made finding the angle he needed to complete his task a little more difficult, but he couldn’t have imagined looming over her.

Hermione handing him those scissors felt like the biggest show of trust he had ever been given. Her expression showing more faith than he had seen when he had been given his Prefects badge, his family ring, or his mark, and unlike in all of those situations her hope had been entrusted without ceremony or the exchanges of promises, though he would have given her whatever she asked for.

He wouldn't do anything to endanger that.

Evander approached her carefully, removing the ends of the longer hairs, pulling them between his fingers and allowing himself a moment to watch how they had already begun to curl. Every so often he ran his hand over her shoulders or her cheek, he spoke to her, meaningless babble really but always in reassuring tones. Anything to keep her with him.

When Evander was done, and the last of the broken feathers had fallen to the floor he raised his wand as if to banish them but something stopped him. He conjured a simple box, syphoning the hair up and placing it inside before pulling Hermione to her feet and handing it to her.

When she looked at him with one of her almost smiles that he was becoming so desperately fond of he knew that he had done the right thing.

Evander reached forward intending to tug on the strands of hair in front of her ear but before he could Hermione reached up to place a hand on his arm, stilling his movements. She gazed at him as she pressed down onto his sleeve, pushing herself up on her tiptoes as she pressed a kiss against his jaw, just to the side of his mouth.

“Thank you,” she whispered and he nodded, staying perfectly still until she lowered her feet back down, leaving the library with the box he had pressed into her fingers.


	7. Chapter 7

Hermione had known as soon as she saw Travers within the walls of Evander’s home that change was coming. The little bubble that they had erected around themselves was being stretched. They wouldn’t be on the own for much longer. She was reminded of another time in her life when she had sat amongst snow covered tree roots in the Forest of Dean and spoke her feelings aloud.

_“We could stay here you know Harry, grow old together.”_

That half plea that even she had no intention of following had been brought on by the threat of the forces of darkness permeating the slim safety herself and her friend had carved out. Now, the very same men were emerging again, only this time not as a threat. At least not to her well being.

The next of the escapees to show up was Thorfinn Rowle, though unlike Louis he did not summon her, by elf or otherwise. It wasn’t a surprise, Thorfinn and herself were far from friends, they were linked through Evander, and while she didn’t get the same sense of hostility from him as she had once received from Rabastan, he did not seem to view her with any kind of interest.

Hermione all but crashed straight into the tall blond as he moved through the halls with a sense of purpose. She somehow got the impression he had been there before. He paused while she wrestled to untangle herself from the plant she had thrown herself towards to avoid him, and he eyed her newly cut hair, his head falling to the side as he regarded her with an eyebrow arched.

“Keeping it?” he asked, and Hermione nodded.

He looked thoughtful for a moment but didn’t say anything further before he tilted his head in acceptance and continued down the corridor.

* * *

The quiet house began to fill with more activity, it wouldn't have been enough for most people to take notice, but to Hermione, every additional set of pounding feet blasted in her ears. The visitors came and went more often now, though she barely saw any of them. She took to hiding out or allowing herself to be dragged down to the kitchens to help out the elves. Today she had retreated from the sounds of slamming doors and found herself on a bench in the formal front garden, her eyes tracing the perfect right angles of the arranged topiary borders with mild disdain.

She heard the crunch of gravel from behind her, and she instinctively shuffled herself slightly, giving him room, if he chose to take it.

“It’s cold out here,” he said in lieu of greeting, his hands coming out to rest on the back of the seat next to her shoulders. His breath clouded past her as if to prove his point and Hermione watched it disperse into the crisp air.

“I know,” she agreed, hiding her smile by fingering the scarf that Fig had almost wrestled her to put on. Evander never scolded her; he didn’t tell her what to do or sigh when she did something he didn’t agree with, he stated his opinion and then that was that. After a few moments of familiar silence, he walked around the bench and folded himself to sit down next to her. His head fell to hers for a moment as if checking what she was looking at before he straightened out.

“I didn’t think you liked the formal gardens,” he observed dryly. Evander had apparently overheard a conversation between her and one of the elves the previous week where she had unthinkingly stated how she preferred the fields and had then had spent ten minutes backtracking after inadvertently causing offence.

“I like them well enough,” she responded, though her words were tellingly dispassionate. “Even if they feel a bit odd to me, too structured, too precise.”

“You don’t belong somewhere like this,” Evander said, leaning back into the seat, an air of soft confidence in his voice and Hermione turned to look at him, the paleness of his skin highlighted by the bright sun.

“No?” She pressed willing him to continue his argument.

“No,” he asserted folding his arms over his chest.

Hermione bit back a smile. While she had been little more than an observer of life around her Evander had seemingly grown to interpret her every thought. One or two-word responses had been enough prodding for him to take up the reigns of conversation, only now he was holding back a little, forcing her to ask for what she wanted, almost daring her to participate. Hermione wanted to be able to hold her tongue, to turn her head back around and pretend he wasn’t there but her curiosity, a feeling that was returning to her more firmly every day, wouldn't let her.

“Where do I belong?” She asked with what she hoped was a casual air. Evander’s face split into a rare grin, an outward acknowledgement of his sense of victory and Hermione suddenly didn't care about winning their little game.

Evander reached over to her, pulling out a small leaf that had somehow become entangled in her hair. “Somewhere wild, somewhere free.” He pressed the leaf into her hand, and its stiffness gave a little crackle, Hermione closed her fingers around it and pulled her legs up onto the bench, tucking them under herself.

“I’ve seen Thorfinn here; I take it he is visiting you?” She asked, her head falling to the back of the bench as she faced him.

Evander turned to look at her, his eyes bright. “He is, they can’t all be like Travers.”

Hermione ignored the tease about Louis’ continued visits. “You seem unlikely friends.”

He nodded a touch of a smile on his face. “I suppose we are. He did me a favour once, back when we were young, the result was we spent more time together. It started out as a debt, a sense of gratitude, then a mutually beneficial arrangement. It became real sometime later.”

“Like us?” Hermione asked it had played at that back of her mind a little of late. She had set them all free after all. The idea of Evander treating her the way he did out of some sense of misplaced gratitude made bile rise in her throat.

“No,” he affirmed immediately, his neck craning up to look at the sky. “You set me free Hermione, but not in the way you imagine. I wasn’t looking for a way through the bars until you appeared.”

Hermione stretched forward to fiddle with the edge of his sleeve until he looked back down at her, pinning her with his determined gaze. “Right from the beginning, you were always so very, very real to me.”

* * *

Hermione had thought about joining the ragtag group of convicts when they came over to discuss plans. She knew that was what they were doing, had even seen some of the maps and lists scattered about the manor, but she had never asked for details, though she imagined she would have been welcome had she wanted to. The door was never shut when they visited, and Evander had made it clear, repeatedly, that nothing was out of bounds to her.

Instead, whenever they were over Hermione would retreat to her room and pull out the parchment cards she had made. Outside of the few dresses, she had consented to take from the elves they were her only possession, and she treated them with reverential care. A trip to the library had given her all of the information she needed to charm the tiny rectangles, protecting them against damage, and she had completed her first planned set. A full ‘deck’ as it were that mapped out the people of her old life.

Only now she had been working on some new additions. These cards were the same, but for a thick border of black she had painstakingly added with her quill. Nine of them. It was the sort of thing she would never have had the patience for before now, but it wasn’t as if she didn't have the time. She had filled in each one as she had with the rest, carefully adding a tiny icon into the centre and adding them to the rest.

The last card, the one she had cut with her wand instead of gentle folding, rested in front of her entirely blank. She had thought about what to include, how to represent him on the parchment, but she could never settle on anything. The others were easier; she could distill her entire feelings into one naturally drawn a symbol.

For him it didn’t work. There was too much.

* * *

Final preparations were underway, and Evander had made his peace with it, as much as any of them had. It was hard ingrained into them, the protection of their house, the inheritance of an estate, to let it all go seemed ridiculous and yet if he did there was at least hope that in the future another of his line could come back and reclaim it. Maybe not his child, but possibly, if the fates were kind to him, a generation or two after that, one far enough removed to act in society without his taint.

He had already found a way to minimise the stain that he would leave on any future offspring; he had picked his partner more carefully than his father had done before him. Hermione did not confirm to a prescribed set of rules that he would have been given once upon a time; she was so much more than that. It was something he had never been taught before, something he had never even aspired to.

Captivating was the promise of happiness that she offered.

Evander had wanted to seek her out that morning, maybe follow the elves to see what they had planned with her for the day, but his musings had been scuppered by an incredibly early visitor.

He glanced over from his position by the fireplace to regard Rabastan, who as soon as he had been given admission to the quiet room had made his way over to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a sizeable tumbler of something incredibly strong before he collapsed into the chair. Rabastan looked worn, Merlin only knew when he had last slept. His pose was a study in a person not able to channel agitation, his hands twitched, and his body fought to remain in place. Rabastan bemoaned the chair as begin uncomfortable, the booze as not being up to snuff before he started asking where ‘the little witch was’.

Evander ignored him.

He had known the wizard in front of him for a long time, first coming across each other when they were little more than children when the Lestrange spare was far too young to have learnt to mask all of his tells yet. So Evander waited him out, forgoing pouring a drink for himself as he sat down in the seat facing him.

Rabastan eyes never left the fire as he began to speak, his voice tremulous. “It’s Ade; he’s not coming.”

Evander thought the information over. It was the sensible decision, one that he imagined Ade must have come to in his by now fleeting moments of lucidity. He had been thinking about the situation in the back of his mind for some time. Ade’s psyche was bruised, he couldn't have been sure that the man would survive their next journey, let alone an attempt to carve out a new life. If he reacted badly, it could lead to their discovery if he touched Hermione again he would put him down himself.

Evander looked back at Rabastan somewhat surprised by the level of pain the man’s face betrayed. Selwyn and Lestrange had been friends at school, as unlikely a friendship as his own with Thorfinn and yet theirs had always been more unequal. Selwyn's family had weathered a significant fall from grace in the generation before, financial mismanagement that had left the bright young heir somewhat beholden to Rabastan for his patronage. Rabastan had not handled that power with any kind of care.

“We can’t leave him behind,” Evander said. His words clear. It wasn’t so much what the man could give away, he had been mostly kept away from their planning, but madness or not he didn't trust what the other side would do if they found him. It was one thing to separate him from his misery, to raise the wand themselves, it was another to leave him behind, defenceless and powerless. To cast him off to be judged by the doubtful mercy of the Ministry was unconscionable.

Rabastan wiped a hand over his face and took a large swig of his drink, gasping after it had burned its way down. “He knows,” he affirmed, before his eyes left the fire to meet Evander’s, an emotion there that made Evander grip the edge of the chair.

“He has made a request,” Rabastan continued and then paused.

Evander’s eyes narrowed before he got up from the chair, violently rethinking his early abstinence as he grabbed the whisky from the shelf.

“I promised him I would ask her,” Rabastan continued as his back was turned.

Evander gripped the glass between his fingers so tightly it almost shattered in his hand. “That was not your place.”

“I know,” Rabastan affirmed as Evander moved back over towards him. His eyes were full of grim resolve as he sat forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “It’s yours, which is why I’m here.”

* * *

At breakfast Hermione toyed with the apple that had been cut up for her by Fig, twiddling each piece in her fingers before she finally gave up and placed it down, wiping her hand on her napkin and facing Evander.

“When are we leaving?” She asked she wasn’t sure why she was in any way concerned. This house was no more her home than any other she had lived in since she had left her parents house, she had known that moving on was inevitable.

If Evander was surprised, either by her question or the way she seemed to blurt it out in spite of herself, he didn't show it. Instead, he folded the paper he was reading and met her gaze. “Soon, some of the others have family still living; they need to make provisions.”

Hermione nodded, she had assumed as much, how much harder it must have been for those that would have people saddened to be left behind. “What about you?”

Evander’s hand moved across the table, resting over her own. “I have everything I need.”

* * *

Hermione stood before their twin beds before getting into bed that evening, and in the midst of a fit of resolve, she transfigured them together, removing the gap and fusing them into a sizeable resting place, knocking a nightstand over in her haste. Her mind whispered that it was wholly reasonable action to take, they both slept on the edges of the single beds, facing each other, and as much as the pain in her elbow let her know that she hadn’t been dreaming it would be a problem if she needed the dexterity to use her wand.

After she had cleared up the mess, she stood still, panting slightly as if her movement had been in any way exerting. She racked her brain trying to decide whether it was best to leave and reenter the room later as if nothing had happened. Any decision she might have made, right or wrong, was taken from her when she heard Evander’s familiar tread coming down the corridor. Hermione placed her wand on the bookshelf and turned to face the wall, keeping still as she heard his footsteps get closer until they stilled by the door, only for a second. If the pattern of his strides hadn’t been so familiar, she probably wouldn't have noticed it.

When Evander’s steps resumed he sounded as if he was heading to the adjoining bathroom and Hermione’s feet became unstuck long enough for her to quickly change into pyjamas and crawl into the bed, steadfastly keeping to her side, she had forced herself on him enough for one day.

Hermione considered turning off the lights for a moment. Everything was supposed to be easier in the dark, if she couldn’t see his face then she couldn't be sure of any negative reactions he might have had. She got as far as raising her hand, the words forming on her lips, but then she stopped herself. The dark was not her friend anymore. The night conjured images and taunted her. The light, seeing him illuminated in their shared space, was such a luxury that even though she was embarrassed and unsure, she couldn’t waste it.

Hermione closed her eyes and turned herself over, her fingers gripping the outer edge of the mattress as she moved to face the window.

Despite her nerves, she had almost fallen asleep when Evander eventually climbed in behind her, and she released a rush of air that without permission became a gentle sigh when his hand moved through the covers to circle over her wrist. She felt her spine relax, her lungs able to inflate and compress again as her chest unclenched. The bed dipped behind her, closer this time as he moved forward, brushing the hair from the back of her neck and slowly feeding his other arm through the gap. He didn't close his arms around her; he kept them still on either side of her frame and Hermione didn't feel restrained even though he surrounded her.

Suddenly awake as she registered his bare arms and the heat pouring off his torso, Hermione's brain rattled for something to say. She thought about giving him an explanation as to why she had done it, why she had sought to act now, but even if she had been inclined to divulge, to find a way to string the words together, she didn't have one. She had acted because she wanted it, wanted him, his closeness. For the first time, she had wanted it more than she was afraid to let herself have it.

Evander’s cool breath lapped against her shoulders like gentle waves, and then as if sensing her rising panic he tightened the grip on her hand.

“I knew you would do me good, that first moment I saw you.” He began, speaking so she wouldn’t have to. “Though how I knew not, small and quiet as you were. When we have been together, here in this room, I have tried to stay quiet enough so that I may hear your heartbeat, the sound of you living, breathing in the same air as me gave me enough peace to allow me to slip into restful sleep. I fear you may have spoilt me by letting me hold you, for I do not think that I will let you go again.”

His voice grew softer and softer, and Hermione fell asleep as he continued to whisper words of comfort into her ear.

* * *

Louis’ visits became more frequent and on some level more welcome. They had moved past the ridiculous formality he had seemed to believe necessary at the beginning and Hermione had been relieved to see the end of china tea trays in the opulent downstairs sitting room.

She had just finished dressing when he popped his head around her door, complaining about how he had been ‘looking all over for her’, steadfastly ignoring the agitated elf at his heels who quickly took off with an exasperated shrug at Hermione’s nod. Louis eyed the newly conjoined bed, and Hermione gripped her hands together focusing everything she had on shielding her memories.

For the first time in as long as she could remember, she had something to protect.

They walked in silence to one of the small comfortable sitting rooms and sat opposite each other, ready for that day's practice. A routine of sorts had been born; Louis would arrive, and they would work on her Occlumency, with varying success, for an hour of so and then go and have something to eat, Evander inevitably stopping to interrupt them at some point. He didn’t seem to have any problem with her relationship with the other Death Eater, though Hermione was under no illusion that he didn't monitor it, she was sure Evander knew exactly where she was in the house at any given time.

She settled into her chair and concentrated on the little bits of information Louis would impart. They had tried in prison but, it had been little more than something for them to do, and in that world of unending grey success had been limited. Now, with the reemergence of colour she felt like she could do it, and so they began the lessons afresh.

There was no parchment on the desk they used, no expectation that she would make notes, no books to be used as references. She knew that old Hermione would have wanted those things to feel safe, especially a book, something to take away for further reading so she could reassure herself that she would be good enough. Louis didn’t even offer one, though she was sure there would be no shortage of them in the library. It was another reminder that they didn't know her before. Who she was to them was who she was now, not a deficient ghost-like comparison of her former golden hued image.

Hermione gripped the table as Louis looked into her mind, as she tried to fight him off. She wasn’t strong enough to block him completely, but over time it was taking him longer to reach whatever it was he was looking for. Her fingers bit into the lacquered wood harder as the room melted away, replaced by the stark white of the Ministry holding cells.

_Hermione lifted her head so that the protective barrier of her matted curls moved from her line of vision. Harry was before the bars, a little distance away, sat on the floor with his legs crossed. She didn’t know how long he had been there; she didn't know how long she had been there, it was all such a blur._

_Her friend that's who he was, though he looked almost as unrecognisable as she did these days. She had done that to him. He looked older, more jaded than he had at the final battle, the weight of life on his shoulders almost sagging his body._

_He had been to visit a few times if that was the right word. What constituted having spent time with another human? It could hardly have been seen as a social call, neither of them spoke, he didn't even look angry with her most of the time. He spoke no words of reassurance either, but she hadn’t expected those._

_Hermione was grateful to him in a way, seeing him provided her with some solace, even if he remained as mute as she did, even if he didn't’ stay long. She understood she had once thought she knew Harry better than she understood herself, never had that been truer than in that moment._

_Harry, didn’t want any more conflict and she had heaped more at his door._

_Hermione had debated once or twice trying to force herself to say something, write it down, anything. But she had pushed the thought away, she remembered the Firebolt in the third year, the arguments in the fifth. He always took Ron’s side. Now Ron wasn’t here. Her’s wasn't even a side he could take._

_This was interrupting his peace. She was interrupting his peace._

_She was an obstacle in his path, and he just wanted to forget._

_He stopped coming after the first week._

When Louis pulled out of her mind Hermione felt nausea climb her throat; she concentrated on the pain in her white fingers as she slowly released her death grip, somewhat surprised to find there weren't divots in the table.

“What was it like?” She asked as a trembling hand reached for the water that was on the edge of the table. Louis battered her fingers away and poured from the jug, pressing the glass into her shaky grip.

“Cold,” he said, looking at her searchingly. Hermione was pleased to find that there wasn’t any trace of pity in his eyes, more, he seemed to look at her as if another piece of a puzzle he was completing had fallen into place.

* * *

When they weren’t traipsing around the manor or spending time with their now more frequent visitors, Evander would take Hermione back into the library to continue their reading. Physical affection was becoming slightly easier between them, but it was the most simple to repeat actions they had already tested. As the reading continued so had Hermione’s soft embrace while they did so. She laid her head against his chest, and he angled the book he was holding to rest on top of his opposite knee. It was awkward, but there was no way he would ask her to move, even after his fingers began to cramp.

Somewhere in the middle of Paradise Lost Evander noticed that Hermione was occasionally picking up on his added words. It was easier for him to detect than it may have been, as she was pressed against him. He could almost feel her hitched breath in his chest, the stilling of her frame ringing like sirens in his mind. He managed to continue, though occasionally his reactive grip on her could have been painful. He read the poem and allowed the words that formed and climbed out of his throat to drift over her, embedding into her flesh.

_Shouting into the dark gives release to the feelings that course through my veins hot as lava. Airing them is essential, I cannot function while they remain in my body. Expelling them gives me room to think, enough air to breath. Speaking them to you, knowing you hear them, removes the burn entirely, and though the heat remains, it is a warmth that soothes._

It became a game of sorts; he challenged himself to see how elaborate he could be, how much he could chop up and restitch the text before Hermione betrayed herself.

His intent was, he could admit to himself, less than honourable, though he was fairly sure she was playing too.

* * *

When Hermione first saw Rabastan, she instinctively knew that it was time to go. She was circling the gallery on the first floor when he came barreling through the front door, his heavy boots making a racket even when muffled by the thick carpet. She walked down the stairs hoping to catch him before his disappeared behind a door. He looked twitchy, impatient, and anxious, even more so than usual, it seemed a good idea to point him in Evander’s direction.

Rabastan looked up at her when she got halfway down the stairs, assessing her ten times less quietly and methodically than Thorfinn had done previously.

“You look less shitty,” he said, pausing in his steps at the same time as a far door opened and Evander walked into the entryway, looking between them both with passive interest.

Hermione didn’t know what compelled her to do it, some shadow of herself pressing her into a forgotten action, like muscle memory acting on its own accord. She stopped in front of him, eyeing him unaffectedly and poked her tongue out.

She was probably more surprised by her response than he was, she expected anger or taunting but instead, Rabastan frantic movements stilled, and he looked at her with something nearing an awed expression till he jabbed his head in Evander’s direction. The other man, still standing slightly away from them, merely nodded once, but he wasn’t looking at his fellow Death Eater, he was looking at her, smiling in his soft way, like a proud parent.

Hermione felt a flicker of her old self, knowing beyond doubt that she would have been incensed. To that girl, such an attitude would have felt patronising in the extreme.

But to her, whoever she was now, it felt like love.


	8. Chapter 8

Hermione pulled at the outer edges of her robes as she began to walk down the dark corridor, it was the only thing that gave any hint of her mounting anxiety, her face remained as impassive as ever. Fig had met her outside her rooms earlier but had beaten a hasty retreat when he sussed where she was going. The tiny elf had taken all of the cheer he enthused into the ominous atmosphere with him.

Hermione had been told since she entered the magical world at eleven that house elves liked working for wizard kind and she had never believed it, not really, not until she came to the manor. She could no longer doubt considering all she had learnt from her interactions with them here; they had sought to help her, in their own unique way, nothing seemed to be beneath their notice. Yet, Hermione observed how they seemed to avoid this part of the sprawling house.

A light, one of the few flames that remained dotted along the corridor, flickered and Hermione felt a prickle of apprehension drift up her spine. Only months ago she would have given anything to feel something, even if it was this awakening terror, now she wasn’t so sure.

In the silence, she could make out the faint noises of people moving around in the downstairs of the main part of the house. Most of the Death Eaters had moved in with them, each of them coming to take up residence with no more ceremony than they did anything else. They had come and gone for so long it had taken Hermione a while to cotton on to the fact that they were no longer leaving. The men confined themselves to set rooms for large parts of the day, they argued amongst themselves, fighting over destinations, routes and supplies.

_It was nearly time._

Despite the growing tension in the air the newly reunited Death Eaters paid Hermione little head, and so she continued her life at the manor as she had for the last few weeks. When she’d had the inclination to think of more than the world directly in front of her, Hermione had wondered why it was Evander they had chosen to swarm around. She had puzzled over whether it was something to do with him or the house, she shut out the voices that whispered it was because of her because she was too fragile, too dangerous to move to another location ahead of their flight.

A whistling sound, so faint she would never have heard it but for how alone she was, pierced through the hall. Hermione debated for a moment, but she kept walking, a pause would mean she would look back over her shoulder, and if she did that she would see the soft, warm light of the entrance hall. No matter how inviting she couldn’t turn back, she had made a promise, a promise to people that somehow still believed her capable of upholding one.

Evander had told her about Ade’s request, though he made it no secret that he did so under some degree of sufferance. Rabastan was there when he made the admission, the emotional man lingered in the corner of the room behind her, he didn’t say anything, he didn’t make a sound apart from the periodic refreshing of his drink, he was clearly only there to see that the information was dispatched. Hermione had considered for a moment that it had meant he hadn't trusted Evander to do so, but that didn’t seem likely, it must have been another unspoken etiquette thing that existed between them all, another mannerism that she would never have the inclination to understand. Hermione thought it was strange really when she had been a child fighting in a war against these people she had thought of them as almost subhuman, rabid beasts and phantom nightmare spectres made real. Yet they seemed to have an unexpectedly well-developed code of, well, she supposed she would call it honour, even though the deeds concerned were usually a good deal less than virtuous in intent.

Hermione’s teeth chattered as she turned the last left and approached the door she had come for. Fig had told her the way in a rush as he had walked with her from the entrance hall, profusely apologising that he wouldn’t be able to take her the entire distance before giving some imagined excuse that Hermione had barely listened too. Evander had said he would come with her, but Hermione had put him off, she wasn’t really sure why maybe another little part of her old self was clicking back into place. A need for independence that bordered on recklessness was probably not something to yearn for, and yet she had learnt the hard way that she had many bad qualities that made up who she was, they were all going to come back for her at some point.

_You can’t see the bright light of the stars without the cloaking black of the night sky._

His brothers in arms had brought Selwyn here in the previous week, under cover of darkness, for necessity, Hermione imagined, though a small part of her wondered whether they had done so to avoid her running into him also. Evander had told her over breakfast the next day that they had given him a room in the little used Eastern part of the house, and though Hermione had never so much as heard him, every day she had felt his magic drift out further. The lights had gone out in the corridor around his room; first, they had flickered, hissed and popped before plunging the halls into darkness. Then the temperature of that part of the house seemed to drop with every passing day. Hermione had followed the example of those around her and ignored it, though the Death Eaters eyes often flashed when they walked passed, they never spoke of it, she was content to do the same.

Ade, however, did not wish to be ignored.

On the fourth day of his stay Hermione had begun to feel a presence, almost as if someone were standing behind her at the oddest of times, and yet, when she spun around, no one was ever there.

She knew it was him, calling to her, reminding her of his appeal.

Hermione had sat silent and motionless for several minutes after Evander had told her, kept in a state of uncomfortable rigidity through shock. She had been near catatonic for such a long time Hermione almost began to explain herself, but one look at Evander’s face and she knew he had read her. He sat back in his chair and rested his hands on his knees. His body language had whispered for her not to rush and Hermione felt the weight of expediency drift from her shoulders. In stilted words that wouldn't quite form even sentences, no matter how hard she tried, Hermione had told them she would think about it and think about it and think about it, she did.

Louis had told her more when he came to practise Occlumency; he had begun the lesson only to abruptly stop when he realised Hermione wasn’t following. He had stepped up from his chair and gestured for her to do the same before guiding them to her preferred window seat. Without preamble Louis launched into a collection of tales from Ade’s life, all of them out of order and most not particularly flattering, but they were told with some degree of affection, even if Hermione suspected you would have had to know the man in front of her quite well to detect it. Traver’s painted a picture of a boy that had been well on his way to losing his faculties even before their master had fallen the first time, a man who was spoken of as being kept alive only by spite and the bloody-minded determination to settle old scores. The final battle had been Selwyn’s last battleground in more ways than one, and he had lost every skirmish. When they were shut up in prison again, he had stopped trying to control his magic, and now he couldn’t get the reins back. Hermione hadn’t asked whether or not Traver’s believed he had tried, she already knew.

Louis had looked at her with a plea in his eyes that his lips didn’t voice and Hermione had been struck again. Honour. All these broken, savage souls and none of them could do it.

Hermione placed a single hand on the dark wooden door, resisting the urge to lay her head against it to collect herself for a moment. She breathed in, a deep slow breath that inflated her chest and with a quick jerking movement pulled on the handle and let herself inside.

The decently sized bedroom was illuminated by soft pockets of light coming from bluebell flames in jars, dotted around at different heights. The seemingly haphazard set up gave the bizarre sensation of being outside, and it was strangely fairytale like in a way that twisted at the corners of Hermione’s mind.

Despite the newly dingy nature of the hall outside it still took a few moments for Hermione’s eyes to adjust and when they did she spotted Ade sat in the corner, perched cross-legged on a mattress that rested on the ground. She turned her head, her eyes casting around in a gentle sweep. Evander’s advice from what seemed like so long ago crept into the front of her mind.

_Take it slow._

All of the furniture in the room had been smashed, jagged splinters lined the floor, and a ramshackle pile of wooden pieces rested in the opposite corner. Hermione nearly bit her lip when her eyes fell on what must have been the only window, boards, no doubt salvaged from the wreckage of what was once pristine antique furniture, had been placed over every crack. It created the illusion if you didn't look too closely, that there wasn’t one at all.

Her eyes drifted back to Ade who was looking in her direction though he seemed to glance right through her.

_This is the environment that you would create for yourself as your last earthly haven? Is this penance for some crime? Do you seek atonement? Or are you too far gone for such things now?_

Hermione allowed the door to close behind her and then held her ground, she thought she might try to say something for a while, but she didn’t know what, the idea of small talk was preposterous, direct discussion unnecessary. Instead, she thought back to when she had first seen Selwyn, as she had walked into the open holding room. Even in her near-zombified state, Hermione had known to avoid him; now his presence screamed danger. If Selwyn had looked hollow in Azkaban it was nothing to how he looked now; his skin seemed to have lost nearly all of its former pigment, his hair had fallen out in clumps, or more likely, had been ripped out. His eyes looked as if they bulged out of the deep, lined sockets and for a brief moment the similarities he carried to his former master were startling.

Hermione had never really understood the expression ‘painful to look at’, the words seemed grossly hyperbolic, it was one of those sayings that indicated the speaker had a way of making whatever was going on about themselves. As she stared at Selwyn, crouched on the ground, the words resonated for the first time, for that was exactly what Ade was. His appearance was excruciating. What was it like for those that had stood with him to regard him now? For those that had studied with him, laughed with him, grieved with him over the years?

Maybe that was why her friends had never met her eyes again.

_Evander had not closed the door as he entered the small sitting room and Hermione's eyes peeked up in time to see Rabastan skulk in behind him. She did not question it, the other Death Eater was often there, though she noticed a tightness around Evander’s eyes that suggested he was less than happy with the arrangement._

_He came to sit in front of her, rewarming the teapot that had been left to cool following her lesson with Louis and Hermione sat forward in her chair, declining a cup when he offered._

_“I need to relay a request, on behalf of Selwyn,” Evander stated, the need in his speech was stressed, he was burdened by it whatever it was._

_Hermione’s eyes flitted to Rabstan who was propped up against a wall regarding his fingernails, through his head was tilted towards them. She turned back to look at Evander who held his cup against the arm of the richly patterned chair._

_“He would like to see you. Before we leave.”_

_It was the first time Selwyn had been spoken of since the escape, not that Hermione had asked, she understood from something that Thorfinn had dropped into conversation that the diminished man had been living in one of the unlisted Lestrange properties, she had thought it odd at the time but had never pressed it. Rabastan being here now suggested there was more to their relationship than she knew, though she had no desire to_ enquire _. Hermione was sure there was plenty they would have liked to ask her._

_She pushed her tongue against the back of her teeth and thought for a moment, the idea that he would have any kind of request for her was unexpected. Grimly she realised that she had not wholly expected to see Selwyn again, she had opened the door to his cell with a wish in the faint beatings of her troubled heart that he might have been able to seek his own form of freedom. Maybe he had._

_“Why not one of you?” She asked finally, not bothering to ask for further clarification as she stared into Evander’s eyes._

_Evander paused for a moment, dropping his head to one side as if he was thinking. “I don’t think he believes any of u would give him what he wants.”_

_“Is that true?”_

_Evander’s eyes drifted to Rabastan, and the other Death Eater backed down what was left in his glass, despite the similar colour, Hermione suspected it had contained something much stronger than tea._

_“We have all had a hand in what he has become.”_

Hermione remained still, her eyes locked with Selwyn’s as he regarded her blankly and yet she felt the challenge in their depths. Awareness tingled around her; it was the same feeling she had got lining up to take an exam, the unsettled sensitivity deep within her bones that had taken hold as she had crept into the Department of Mysteries. She was on a precipice, something was about to happen, and then, like a stiff wind, the air was knocked out of her lungs.

Hermione wasn’t sure how she remained upright, Ade hadn’t moved, but he had done something, his magic, dark and sticky like tar, seemed to be pulling back from where it had seeped into the house. It blew through the walls and licked at her flesh, charging around the room like a messy cyclone before it deposited into the corner.

The entire process must have only taken seconds, but to her it felt like hours, the force of it pulled Hermione onto her tiptoes and dragged her head back. When the whirring stopped, she felt like a puppet that had its strings cut and against her will she doubled over, panting softly as she regained her breath.

When the silence broke again, it was to the sound of bones cracking. Ade contorted in his position, his joints flexing and his neck twisting around then back and forth, as if he physically needed to adjust himself now he had stopped projecting his magic.

Hermione felt the warmth return to her fingers, and for a moment she felt reassured, though a voice in her mind told her that was illogical that she should be more wary of him now than ever. She had never been this close to Selwyn, not without both of them having their magic restrained. Now he had his magic, power he was not wholly in control of. And yet she did not fear him, not really, hurting her would defeat his primary purpose, though it didn’t make her drop her guard. Whatever his request Hermione was certain that when it came to the desires of his heart, choking the life out of her would have been a close second.

He bent a final time, settling down to becoming still again and resuming his impassive gaze. Whatever Hermione was, whatever else she had done, she had always faced up to her responsibilities, and in some way, Ade had become hers when she had taken it upon herself to free him during their escape. She had never thought about whether she should have done it, whether the others were intending to do so before she made the decision for them.

It was no secret that the Death Eaters didn’t want to bring him for their next journey, for his own good, and for theirs Hermione imagined. But the arguments didn’t matter because this time Ade didn’t want to follow, the cell door had been unlocked, and yet Ade wasn’t looking to cross the threshold further.

Hermione could not allow him to live here with just the ravages of his own mind for company.

“What do you need?” She asked, her voice unwavering, she kept her head up and her back straight.

“I’m not coming,” his voice was no more than a rasp, and yet it hinted at what must have been there before, a lingering gesture to a commanding tone.

Hermione nodded once; she knew that already, he knew that she knew.

“I need to be free,” he said, his eyes almost boring into hers before his skeletal fingers slid up his face to tear at the remaining clumps of his matted hair.

Hermione understood, she had understood since she was sat down in front of Evander as he passed on this man’s message. Even if his words hadn’t set her off on the right track, the atmosphere of the room would have. All that time in silence had left Hermione more perceptive than before; she could hear unsaid words now, as if people thinking them gave way to vibrations in the air, tremors she could interpret and understand.

The only question that remained hovered over her soul, what was left of it, could she do this and survive intact? Would it plunge her deeper again? Would she not be able to surface this time? Would she care?

Ade raised his head again and dropped his sallow cheek to the top of his knee. Her eyes had looked like that. Watery, unseeing. Hermione wondered how Evander could ever have looked at her with anything more than the mix of fear and pity she currently had warring within herself.

There wasn’t a fix. She wasn’t fixed. But she was young, and willing, at least some days.

Ade was none of those things. He didn’t want to be well or whole, he wanted, simply, not to feel.

Hermione brushed a hand through her hair, feeling the edges of the shorn crop as they prickled against her fingertips. Evander had done that for her, had cut away the bad, had pruned the dead leaves in the hope that there would be new growth. She back at looked at Ade and felt the weight on her shoulders gravitate to sit over her heart.

She told herself that Evander would do it again, if she needed him to.

Resolved, Hermione stepped further into the centre of the room; she hadn’t bothered with shoes and her feet made barely a sound. She couldn't see the floor clearly, but she could feel chips of the broken wood impaling into her soft flesh. When she reached the mattress, Hermione crouched down onto her knees and pushed a hand into the pocket of her dress, lifting up and holding out the thin phial of murky blue liquid that Travers had given her on his last visit. He had pressed into her hand without meeting her eyes before he kissed the top of her head. It had been far from typical behaviour, Louis was easily the most verbose of all of them, having had plenty to say even when she had been near mute. His lack of words had been telling.

Ade reached forward and lifted the glass tube between his thumb and forefinger, twisting it this way and that, his eyes tracking the way the clumpy fluid trickled from one end to the other.

“There is more than enough here,” he said at last. In spite of his blank voice and vague words, it was a thinly veiled invitation, one she had no intention of taking him up on.

Selwyn raised an eyebrow at Hermione’s impassive face, the side of his mouth pulling into a horrific looking smirk before he pulled the cork out of the tube with a wet pop and backed the whole thing down in a single gulp.

At first, there was nothing but the two of them sat in silence, and then, all of a sudden, everything seemed to happen at once. Ade’s body began to convulse; there was no build up, no warning, he went from utterly motionless to wracked by tremors in an instant. His dark eyes rolled back, and sweat broke out on his mottled skin. He grunted, a low and deep sound, it spoke of pain, of unimaginable torment. Hermione expected him to end up flat; instead, he reached forward for her, his fingers twisting into claws as he pulled at the fabric of her dress.

Hermione didn’t move away, though the harsh touch did spur her into action, she sat back up on her knees and dragged her arms from out of his grip, detangling herself so she could wrap herself around his shoulders and press her forehead against his neck. She held on even as he gouged at her skin, his broken nails ripping through her sleeves. She held on even as he called her filth and spat blood at her.

Death had a strange way of announcing itself; there was never any outward sign that it would be coming and yet it was always there, like an out of focus picture. You knew it was coming. As his end approached Ade reached for Hermione’s face, pushing so hard on each cheek that her nose began to bleed, she didn’t realise until the thick trail coated her lip and she could taste the copper tang. He wrenched her head forward until they were only inches apart.

“T- Thank y- you,” he whispered falteringly, his voice barely audible over the sounds of his body crumpling.

Hermione nodded, with as much movement as she was able given his savage grip.

Moments later his irises faded, the entire gateway to what was left of his checkered soul becoming bathed in milky white. Then he was gone.

He was free.

* * *

Hermione barely noticed that the corridor was back to normal as she retraced her steps to the main entryway. She only made it to the second bend when she saw Evander; his dark hair had fallen almost into his eyes as he sat, propped up against the wall, his legs bent, and his arms stretched out on top of them. His expression looked neutral, maybe even peaceful, but it wasn’t enough to fool her into believing that he hadn’t been sat there in a state of perpetual readiness since she had left their room that evening. She supposed she could have asked why he was waiting but there didn't seem to be much point, they both knew, he wasn’t attempting to hide it from her.

It was only when he was on his feet and in front of her that Hermione realised how she was leant against the wall, using it is as a cumbersome walking aid. Absently she wondered if she had made a bit of a mess of the beautiful wallpaper, it wouldn’t matter now; the elves would once again resume their rotations around here now the foreboding climate had shrunk away.

Hermione reached a hand towards her chest and let her fingers drift over her warm skin. She would have an age to puzzle out whether Ade had taken all of his viscous magic with him, or whether he had left some over her, a parting gift, of a kind.

Evander delicately placed a hand under her chin and regarded her for a long moment, the only outward sign of his hostile emotions was the tightness of his mouth. When he stepped forward to lift her off the ground Hermione didn’t make a single protest at the unfamiliar contact, she simply wrapped her arms around his neck, letting him pull her knees against his chest. That she could allow herself to be touched, let some of the fear flutter away. Maybe she wouldn't sink so deep this time; maybe the context would alleviate some of the guilt, perhaps it was easier the more times you did it, maybe her soul was lost to her now. Unlike Ade, she would have a chance to consider.

Evander made towards the central staircase but Hermione muttered a few words of protest, her task wasn’t finished yet. After a silent exchange that ended with him releasing her with a sigh, Hermione crept into the first reception room in the Western part of the house; the Death Eaters tended to congregate here.

She had barely opened the door before she felt every voice held within fade away, without Evander’s support she could feel herself limping, one arm moving to clutch the other. She was aware there was still blood trickling from her nose, but she ignored it; instead, she shuffled to the centre of the room, to stand before Rabastan, she didn't say anything, she didn’t have to. The only sound was of bottles opening, and more whisky being sloshed into glasses.

Feeling her energy dwindling away to nothing Hermione turned her mind full of heading back to Evander and the solace he would provide. As she walked past a sombre looking Louis, a question burned in her throat, one that she could not ignore.

“Wasn’t there anything….”

“Kinder?” He asked in a gruff tone, his eyes fell to the blood smeared on her lips and he almost fully suppressed his wince. Hermione stared at him until he uncomfortably rubbed a hand over his stubble lined jaw.

“Yes,” he admitted eventually, his hand coming up to touch one of her bruised fingers. “He… he wanted that. That was his request of me.”

“To inflict his final torture,” Hermione said, though she wasn’t wholly sure if she meant on himself or her, maybe both?

Louis looked sideways at her for a moment before giving a minute shake of his head. “So you would remember.”

* * *

Hermione forgot about the wake like gathering as soon as she was back with Evander, there was too much weight in that room to think on for long. Too many anchors were tied to her own feet, without worrying about anyone else's. When she had emerged into the hall, Evander had carried her up the stairs and straight into the bathroom of their room. Once inside he pulled her ripped and bloody clothes from her abused flesh with an expression that had enough detachment to mean she wasn’t embarrassed and yet each touch was performed with the delicacy of a person pulling away the crinkled petals of an ageing rose.

He held her hands as she stepped into the bath. Hermione put her hand in his in the way she always had, looking for comfort and sure of safety.

As her head relaxed against the bronze edge of the tub Evander stepped away, coming back with a flannel he had already heated and that he used to softly wipe away the blood that lined her face. His hands ran over her arms, playing particular attention to each section of her fingers, whether to check that nothing was broken or just to touch her, Hermione wasn't sure.

Once the water was so full it nearly sloshed over the edges Evander turned off the taps before he leant forward and held her face between his hands. He had no way of knowing that was how she had been positioned earlier that evening, or maybe he had, perhaps he thought his touch could erase Ade’s. The expression on Evander’s face could not have been more different from what she had seen in Selwyn’s, and yet he regarded her with just as much desperation, as much pleading for salvation. Evander held her like she was made of crystal, his fingers barely there, but the force of his gaze held her more firmly than any earthbound force had before.

When his lips lowered to hers Hermione briefly considered leaving her eyes open, nothing real ever happened in the dark, but as soon as his flesh connected with hers, they shut reflectively, instinctively she knew her lids were the only thing holding long overdue tears back. When he nudged her mouth open, she felt her chest inflate, as if he was breathing life into her. Again.

Hermione felt lost and found all in one moment. As his press became more instant, she sank into the line in between, the world in which she now occupied, between dark and light, good and bad, saints and sinners.

Eventually, Evander pulled away, though the didn't move far, he dunked the flannel back into the water and ran it over her chilling arms. She smiled as she noticed the pink in his cheeks and he stared at her, until slowly as if she could watch the workings of his mind, he returned it.

Hermione considered that she should have been more conscious of the fact she was naked, embarrassed even. Especially since he was clothed and she no longer had a curtain of hair to hide behind as she had done in days gone by. But she couldn’t spare a single thought of it, not with the taste of him in her mouth. It helped that Evander seemed to ignore it, his eyes certainly never wandered, his focus was entirely on her face as he continued to work on putting right her damaged self, only pausing every once in awhile for another kiss or a touch to her cheek.

“I would have done it,” he said finally, an answer to a question she had only half asked days before. Evander held her gaze until she nodded once and then he resumed whatever he was preoccupying himself with.

He didn’t tell her that she shouldn’t have acted, that she was stupid.

Hermione sank further down into the water, sure Evander would tell her if she drifted too far.


	9. Chapter 9

Evander woke up suddenly, his lungs inflated in a rush as if he had been denied breath and the harsh action made his hand reach for his chest to feel his heart hammering against his ribcage. He had idly thought the day before, as he had pressed his lips against Hermione’s that he might have pleasant dreams. It hadn’t been the case. He didn’t dream of anything anymore. As his breathing slowed, Evander pushed up on one hand, chastising himself for his reflection, for his romantic choice of things to focus on from the previous day. The last period of sunrise to sunset should have been etched into his memory as the moment Selwyn had slipped off their mortal coil, but it wasn’t. Maybe in time, he would find it within himself to push past the darkness that clawed at his throat when he considered the request the man had made, and that he didn’t stop it. But not yet. It would take him longer than the time he had at present to settle his feelings on his diminished former comrade.

As if sensing the imposing blackness settling into his thoughts Evander’s hand reflectively reached out in the bed next to him only to find cold twisted bedding. His fingers slid across damp sheets that were usually occupied by someone that was tormented by changing nightly distortions that he could only guess at. Evander gripped the cotton tightly as he pulled himself up, his mind running through a list of where she could be as his heart began thudding again. A slight movement in the window stowed his more frantic plans, and Evander pushed himself back against the headboard as quietly as he could, allowing himself to take in her familiar silhouette as Hermione perched in front of the large bay window, framed by the open curtains.

“I can feel you staring.”

Hermione’s words drifted back to him so softly Evander could almost believe he had heard them in his mind.

_Whispered, uncoloured by emotion, and only for me._

With a smile that didn’t entirely fit his mood, Evander pressed his feet down into the plush carpet and stalked towards her. Hermione didn’t turn around though he knew she could sense he had moved, when Evander was close enough he reached for her, gently pulling her shoulders against his bare chest as he allowed himself to drag the tips of his fingers through her short hair.

Something had broken the night before, Evander had expected it to be Hermione, after committing such an act he had resolved himself that she would slip back into nothingness. He had marched around for the first ten minutes after she had disappeared into the bowels of the house, cursing himself from not dissuading her, even though he knew Hermione had been too set in her decision to have prevailed. Evander had promised himself, as he had sat in the hallway feeling the minutes creep by, this time he would not allow her to sink. He was no longer capable of the soft coaxing; he wasn’t able to rely on her own will to get her back to the surface. Not now he had tasted her. This time he would claw at her desperately, would secure her sanity to his, would do everything in his power to reverse the effects quickly. He had been determined, and then Hermione had appeared in the corridor and Evander had felt his soul pull him to his feet, in its desire to bring itself to orbit hers again.

He had reached for her, and she had allowed it, had snuggled into his hold, had gripped his neck pulling him tighter. Then he had kissed her, and she had let him, more than that, she had responded.

Evander pushed his feet into the carpet and ran his fingers from the top of Hermione’s head, down past her ear and then onto her neck. She leant into the touch, her eyes closing as her head fell back against his chest. She felt so delicate like this, wrapped in her conservative nightwear, so much more so even than the day before when she had stood before him entirely naked. Evander had been careful not to touch her till she was submerged into the water, doing his best to fight against the red mist in his mind as he catalogued her recent bruising. For the rest of their time in the bathroom he had marvelled at how earthly her flesh looked, how normal, no different from skin he had seen a thousand times. It had been a long time since he had seen a naked woman, especially one so beautiful, but still, it matched up to his memory.

_How is it possible that something that has captivated me so thoroughly, could be so real, so human, so mortal? I had expected her body to glitter under the lights, her veins to shine like rivers of molten gold. Something that would have belied the magic within, something that would have explained my bewitchment._

Carefully, Evander nudged Hermione back into a sitting position before drifting away to an old sideboard pushed against a far wall, and collecting a box that he had secured in place sometime before. He nudged the hair out of his face as he turned back around and caught Hermione in her full glory, staring back at him, slight hint of confusion dancing across her wide brown eyes as the light of the moon cut across her pale face and drifted down her body, highlighting the fastenings of her shirt.

_Earthly indeed._

Evander supposed that if they were in anything approaching a normal courtship, he would have tried to broach what had happened the night before. He would maybe have waited till breakfast and taken Hermione’s small hand in his before kissing her palm and asking her how she was feeling. Perhaps he would have drifted fingers over her smiling face, wiping crumbs from her mouth as he called her dear one.

_For all that I have been a poet for most of my life, at this moment, with you, words are both not enough and not necessarily all in one breath._

Deciding to act on instinct, as he had done since he had first seen her, Evander dispensed with the elegant packaging and chucked it behind himself, holding the silver cuff in his hands which he placed on her arm without ceremony. As Hermione looked down, he secured it around her wrist, sliding two fingers under the metal before he reached for his wand and tightened the bangle until it pushed against them. The metal was understated and yet a good deal less ominous than a similar bracelet she had worn in a life that seemed so long ago now.

Evander set his wand down as Hermione twisted her wrist, flexing her muscles and fixing the jewellery into place. Her face gave away nothing as she breathed in through her nose. “But what will you wear?” she asked, her voice once again cutting through the stillness of the room.

Evander gripped her delicate fingers and encouraged them to slide around his own wrist, mirroring the grounding action he had always used on her. His arm was absent of silver, and yet, it was just as bound.

“Hermione, I already feel you.”

* * *

Hermione straightened her robes and looked over at the pack laying on the end of their bed once more. It seemed that all she had now until they left was empty time, she had so much experience of that, but even she could sense a difference to the solitary quiet. Before time had been a void, a steady beat of untold seconds as she would lay back and try to summon the will required even to let herself decay. Now there was anticipation, it was muted, but it was there.

Evander had left her shortly after dawn, retreating from their room smoothly like the darkness that had been eaten away by the rising sun. He hadn’t left the room to change, a stark difference from their usual routine. He had faced her as he adjusted his clothes and raised an eyebrow slightly when Hermione had pulled her legs against her chest and let her head rest on top of her knees. His face had tried to reflect a levity she wasn’t sure he was capable of, but she imagined it was to put her at ease, not that she needed it, there was nothing sexual in his display, Evander was levelling the field once again, making them equal.

Fig had arrived not long after Evander had pulled on his outer robes, the little elf no doubt summoned by his departing master. Fig had helped her get ready, and Hermione had allowed the fuss with little more than a withering look. It had felt strange to pull on trousers after so such a long procession of dresses but flowing skirts wouldn't be of much use to her out in the wilderness. While Hermione had no doubt Narcissa Malfoy could have taken on half the Auror corps clad in a ballgown and tiara, for herself, she was much more prepared to face the realities of her new life in comfortable shoes and clothing.

After brushing her hair a little too vigorously Fig had gestured for Hermione to sit down on the end of the bed, ‘out of the way’, so he could add the final things to the pack that Evander had laid out for her. Hermione had settled herself against the duvet and wondered when, if, they would ever be in such pleasant surrounding again. Her fingers pulled on a bit of hair in front of her ear as her teeth sank into her lips.

“Hermione will care for Master.”

The words shocked her out of her fallow state, and Hermione looked up to find Fig continuing with his business as if nothing had been said.

“Yes,” she replied, in just as even a tone. “I will.”

* * *

Hermione had managed to make a quick tour of the house before nightfall, returning to some of her favourite spots on the grounds, shrinking a few books and other objects to add to her bag. Fig came to retrieve her for the last time when she was in the library, he didn’t speak as he led her to one of the larger drawing rooms, neither mentioned how the tiny elf held onto the cuff of her sleeve until they were at the door. Hermione wasn’t sure she was capable of a proper goodbye, everyone in life that she had cared about had been taken from her before she had been able to utter one.

As she walked into the room, Hermione was reminded of the first time she had been pushed into that grey space, how she had slowly taken in their forms and the way they clustered together in little pockets. In contrast to that time not one of them looked up at her arrival, they carried on in their factions conversing quietly, sometimes as a whole group as they hammered out the last of their plans.

Hermione hovered on the edge of the conversation, paying just enough attention to glean the plan for the evening. Once she had chosen a chair by the fire and wrapped herself within its depths, Rabastan approached her silently, pressing a hand hard against her shoulder before pushing a tumbler into her fingers.

They were to leave in pairs staggered over time to avoid detection, though they would stick close together, with all of the pairs meeting up every few hours to regroup and plan the next stage. Being close but without being obvious would give them the best chance of survival were they discovered. Hermione tried not to think about it.

As the sun began to set in the sky, Hermione finally moved from her chair and went to retrieve her pack that was sat beside Evander’s feet but before she could make it a large hand held her back.

Thorfinn Rowle looked down at her, his eyes hard but without real anger. “You go with me,” he barked as a command, and Hermione dropped her head back to meet his gaze, something of a familiar sense of indignation tickling along the outside of her neck.

Whatever he read from her face he elected to clarify, “You distract him,” he continued, and Hermione shrugged her agreement as Louis rolled his eyes.

* * *

Hermione’s eyes remained on the ground as she followed in Thorfinn’s wake. The conversation between them since they had left the manor had been minimal at best and for the last hour, entirely non-existent. For all of his well-intentioned bleating, Thorfinn didn’t seem to care for being her partner much. Much as she tried Hermione couldn’t keep up with his long strides and was far less stealthy over the uneven ground than she would have liked to be. They had been trekking for hours and any modicum of poise she had started off with had eroded through fatigue. When Hermione stumbled for the third time in ten minutes, Thorfinn stopped, drawing himself up to his full height before he dramatically threw his head back and released a sigh.

Hermione righted herself as best she could, thankful that she had managed to keep herself from falling and trudged forward, wincing at the wet squelching sound her boots made in the wet grass. Thorfinn didn’t say anything to her, he didn’t even look down, he merely raised his wand from his robes and created a knot pattern in front of him that became an unfamiliar twist of magic before he swished his wand in its direction, and it sped away through the trees.

Hermione folded her arms over herself as they continued to stand in silence, though she had no idea what they were waiting for. The lack of movement was allowing her to realise how much pain she was in, the sensation crawling up the back of her calves. Her eyes darted around them with every sound. She hadn’t seen anyone else since they had departed, though as Thorfinn hadn’t seemed perturbed by that, so she had tried to keep herself from worrying.

Hermione couldn’t help the small sigh of relief that escaped her when Louis appeared in the clearing, though she needn’t have worried about being overheard, the mirroring noise from the wizard above her all but drowned her comparably little exclamation.

Louis crawled towards them, his eyes looking her over before he stopped with one eyebrow raised, his lips quirked slightly in amusement as he turned to Thorfinn. The blond wizard glared at him in response, “Make sure she doesn’t die. She’s clumsy as fuck, but there is barely enough of her to make any noise.” He apparently couldn't have cared less what either of them would say to that as a second later Thorfinn was gone, making barely a sound despite his size and obvious irritation.

“Arsehole,” Louis muttered and Hermione smiled, an expression he returned.

Hermione continued walking, and though the terrain was just as rough, and the pain just as biting, the silence between her and her new partner was far more comfortable. It helped. When they had been hiking long enough to see the beginnings of the sun's rays poking through the trees, Louis glanced over at her to check her position, catching a slight glimpse of a twinkling at her wrist as he did so.

“You know that's not just a trinket right?” he asked as he shot a quick spell in front of them revealing a knotted mass of tree roots over the forest floor.

Hermione nodded, though he wasn’t looking at her. “Yes,” she affirmed quickly, “I don’t have any problem with it.”

“Not even the tracking spell?” Louis incredulously continued as he sliced through the decaying roots on the ground.

Hermione considered what to say, and how to say it, rolling the words around her tongue. “It’s nice that someone cares enough to place one.”

Louis’ feet stopped moving for a moment, not enough to signify a break in his stride but Hermione heard it all the same. The air was quiet between them for a while before he enquired again. “Without your knowledge?”

This time it was Hermione who stopped, pausing to look up at Louis as he seemed to arrange his face into pained neutrality.

“He knew I would know,” she replied and then walked past him, deciding to lead for a little while, even if she didn’t have any idea where they were going. It wasn’t a defence, Evander didn’t need one. Neither was she genuinely annoyed, just like the hidden spells that she had felt tingle along her skin when the silver hit her flesh, Louis questions had warmed the tips of her fingers. It was nice that someone had asked.

* * *

The revitalisation Hermione had felt following Louis’ unexpected arrival dissipated far too quickly, and it wasn’t long before she was once again aware of every step she took. When darkness began to fall around them her legs repeatedly threatened to give out, rather than emulating the sighing and pointed looks she had received from Thorfinn, Louis stopped in his tracks whenever Hermione slowed and patiently waited for her to catch up before he set off again. When Hermione no longer had enough energy to keep her movements quiet, he shot a quick spell straight at her feet, muffling the harshness of sound.

A full night and day after leaving Evander’s manor Hermione and her new partner arrived at the first stop, an area of seemingly secluded woodland where they were to set up camp for the night. She briefly pondered where in the UK they were, but she didn’t let herself worry about it too much. Hermione had never bothered to ask where the manor had been situated, so even taking a guess based on how far they had travelled would have been pointless.

When they trudged through the trees it was evident they were the last there and the small space buzzed with quiet activity. Most of their limited number were settled under the relative camouflage of the trees, though Hermione could make out Thorfinn and Evander stood a way off from the heart of the camp. Thorfinn looked as if he were trying very hard to look bored as Evander stared up into his friend's face, his eyes unrelentingly hard. He appeared to be speaking in a series of unbroken sentences, each word seemingly being enunciated much more clearly than normal, given the exaggerated movement of his lips. As Rabastan called her name in sarcastic greeting Evander’s head snapped in Hermione’s direction, and he immediately started towards her, casting one last warning look over his shoulder.

It was something of a surprise that when he reached her, he pulled her roughly against him, in a hug that was more fierce grip than gentle embrace. It was more physical contact than they had ever publicly displayed, almost more than they had ever really had, but if the others were disturbed by it, they made a good show of hiding it. Evander leaned back from her eventually, his hand reaching to circle her wrist as he guided her towards a tree that already had a pack underneath.

As they settled into the blanketing darkness, they shared some of their provisions and talked in their own sparse way about their day before Evander was called over to look at the map with the others. Despite her worry and the pain that seemed to be chasing up from the bottom of her feet, Hermione was almost asleep by the time he came back.

“Sleep, I’ll be here when you wake up.”


	10. Chapter 10

Hermione felt like she had barely blinked when a hand rested on her shoulder to shake her awake. The little clearing they had stopped in was still illuminated by the light of the fading stars as she forced her eyes to open, but she made no protest, she hadn’t anticipated a peaceful lie in. As the group of escapees gathered themselves the air was thick, they had made it this far but all of them, even Hermione, were acutely aware of the potential dangers that lay ahead. Hermione had begun to wonder who among them would be lumbered with her company for the next leg but it quickly became apparent that no matter what anyone else might have wanted Evander was determined that they would travel together. Thorfinn did not voice any complaint; the towering blond repeatedly stepped out of the way as Evander moved determinedly around the camp gathering up supplies. Hermione supposed it made sense, the two were not likely to settle their differences physically, and a friendship like theirs would have seen so many differences of opinion, it was best to let them come back around on their own.

After a brief conversation with a twitchy Rabastan, Evander stalked back to where she was, and Hermione finished folding her bedding into her small bag. As she pulled the rucksack over her shoulder, she considered what might have happened to her beaded purple purse. In the cottage she had once called home it rested inside one of the wardrobes in the bedroom, hanging up on the back of the door. Would anyone have taken it, for safe keeping? It didn’t seem likely, though they must have searched the home and she didn't remember hearing mention of it on her list of crimes, maybe they just hadn’t recognised it for what it was.

Evander must have sensed that her thoughts were far away as he guided her by the elbow, moving her around the milling men a lot more gracefully than Hermione would ever have managed on her own. This time they were the first to leave the clearing and Hermione shot a quick look at Louis as she passed. He answered her concerned frown with a wink and Hermione almost smiled. For so many her bouts of silence would have been beyond strange, had been for her friends, peers and the guards who had abused her, but not for these men. The Death Eaters around her communicated so much, often without words at all. She wasn’t sure how to feel when she noticed more and more indicators that she had found some kind of abstract place, kinship and understanding amongst their number, it went so much further than just her relationship with Evander.

Hermione adjusted the bag on her back as they moved onto the path ahead and Evander released her elbow, moving to walk slightly ahead, but never far enough that so she was no longer in his line of sight. The journey the road took them on was different to the one before, the terrain was considerably less bumpy, though the woodland was far denser. A mere hour after setting off any thoughts of seeing the dawning sun were abandoned, the trees around them were so tall they blocked out most of the light. In places, the way ahead was marked only by the shimmering slats of sunlight that managed to break their way through the bark or muted magic from the end of Evander’s wand.

Hermione felt herself relax more than she had been able to the previous day, Thorfinn’s company made her feel like she was perpetually on the precipice of conflict. Louis’ presence was incredibly soothing in comparison, but Evander, she couldn't even really explain what he felt like. Evander seemed to be able to anticipate every false step she made, almost presumptively reaching back to steady her or offering his hands to guide her over obstacles. Hermione had expected silence, but instead, Evander was more predisposed than ever to engage her in conversation. They were by no means chatty, but as their feet continued to crunch along the ground, they traded questions in a sort of game they had started weeks before. ‘Tell me about’ Evander would begin, in a tone that gently invited her to answer, and as day became night, Hermione asked a few questions of her own.

In a many ways, it was like having their bubble back, Evander had first cast the orb around them when they were in prison, somehow he had managed to block out their environment just by being there. When he had sat down and read to her nothing else in the world encroached on them, not the bruising covering her body, or the heavy weight of her heart. The protective, inclusive walls around them stretched when they arrived at the manor, their outlines growing to the bordering walls around the land of his family home, and yet for all that space, they felt like they were the only two people that mattered. In the sprawling grounds, Hermione often felt like she had been swept away into her own corrupted fairy-tale. Now they were here, trekking through the woods, Merlin knew where her feet hurt and danger prickled at her senses and yet she was conscious of the sun trying to shine and the birds singing. Until they were silent.

Hermione didn't notice how the noises of the forest around them had retreated as night fell, but Evander had, and she noticed him, his reaction put her on her guard. They had moved into a small clearing a few steps before, the first open space they had been in all day, a great area for an ambush, Hermione’s mind supplied and she felt the tingling of those senses she had relied on a life time before.

Evander stood stock still for a moment, his eyes darting around them, he didn’t look panicked, not even slightly. Her assessment of him was interrupted by a single sound echoed in the distance, a single twig snapping or something similar. It was followed swiftly by the rush of fast feet in the distance, and the atmosphere around them shifted entirely. Their bubble broke. Evander’s usually neutral face took on a harder edge, though his expression never really changed there was a coldness about him that Hermione didn’t recognise. As he swirled around, specks of light appeared in the treeline.

In a move quicker than Hermione could follow, Evander had gripped her by the arm and pulled her in front of him so he could meet her eyes. “Push your back up against mine, wand out.”

Hermione did as she was bidden, the old reflexes simmering under the flesh of her fingers as she gripped her wand and held it out. A quick scan of the environment told her without much question that whoever it didn't have them surrounded, outnumbered indeed, but not surrounded. The real danger was at the front, where Evander was facing.

As Hermione’s heart began to beat rapidly against her chest more figures appeared in the treelines, this time in her direction. She considered for a moment that there were more tracking them than they had initially thought, but then, her eyes narrowed. These figures did not appear with twinkling lights extended, announcing their presence. These figures appeared like wraiths, black hoods pulled over their heads, streaming forward with movements that were as flowing like a liquid, as intangible as smoke. Hermione could make out the occasional glint of their impassive faces; these figures were not ones she would need to defend Evander against.

Like the reality of the battles had Hermione faced in her youth she knew it would take her days to piece together all that happened. All she could pick out at the time were fleeting impressions, momentary recognitions of colour, shape and feeling. Perceiving the dark red of the advancing Auror robes, and wondering when Louis and Rabastan had gotten there. Shots were fired, vicious, bright, wounding shots, they moved passed her, at her, around her. Despite the threat Hermione couldn’t fire her wand, she held it aloft, her hand holding it tightly as her arm cramped, but she couldn’t think of a single spell.

One of their number fell, a black robe fluttered and then was still and a wall of Aurors moved further into the space.

“Get back into the trees,” Evander called back to her and Hermione complied, doing her best to leave the space without detection. She needn’t have worried, none of the men present even seemed to notice her, at some point the normal survival instincts expected in a skirmish had transcended to blood lust, on both sides. The fight between these forces was never ending; it was no longer about the principles that either side held, it was about the scars they had inflicted on each other’s skin, past humiliations and the need for dominance.

When she reached the trees, Hermione pulled herself against a large trunk and watched Evander, free from shielding her smaller body he moved about the clearing with grim purpose. Hermione’s eyes scanned for all of her fellow escapees, and her eyes widened a fraction. The release of the monster within, her mind chimed, Hermione could think of nothing to refute the statement.

Rabastan leapt around, propelling himself from place to place, brandishing his wand like he was fencing. He enjoyed it, Hermione realised, his dark eyes revelled in it, the spectacle, the fight, the kill. In all the time she had known him he had never looked more alive. Rabstan grinned horribly as blood spattered all over his face and Hermione looked away.

Louis fought in a way that Hermione imagined to the untrained eye would look lazy, he barely flicked his wand, and he advanced slowly. He didn’t rush between the pockets of the battle he stuck with one until his opponent was vanquished. He used psychology, Louis got into the heads of those he was fighting, whether with Legilimency or merely the force of his power Hermione wasn’t sure. He made look as if fighting was barely holding his attention.

Evander, like in so many other things, Evander was different. Stalking around the clearing he was almost unrecognisable, every angle of his face in sharp relief. He didn’t play around; he didn’t make any noise, he never engaged in unnecessarily protracted duels. His shots were vicious, to the point and nearly always fatal. He didn’t attempt to display power or score points. It was simple to him, he didn’t care if his opponent knew they were bested, whether they feared him before death, they were in his way. He was an assassin.

Hermione was concentrating so hard on Evander’s process that she missed the exact moment when Louis fell. He was already tumbling backwards when a sharp cry alerted her to what had happened, and it had her running from the safety of her position without a moment's thought. The Auror he was fighting with had already been drawn away into another duel by the time her feet came skidding to a stop by his torso, and Hermione almost landed on top of his body in her haste to drop to her knees.

Louis didn't speak as she ripped his dark robe open and scanned over his shirt until she found a large patch of red advancing from underneath his heart. Hermione stared into his face, not wanting to look down at her sticky fingers.

“It’s a flesh wound,” Louis said with a familiar smile, one that twisted into a grimace as blood streamed from his nose.

Hermione screwed her eyes shut and palmed her wand, forcing herself to remember the healing charms she had learned for her time on the run. The magic came back to her this time, flowing through her mind like water and she thought to organise herself into action. Finally released from the blank she had been in Hermione cast all she could, fixing all of Louis’ superficial injuries in an instant and doing what she could to the larger ones. As she worked the seeping blood revealed where else he had been hit, there were three large patches on his chest now, and they were all resilient against everything she was trying.

“Hermione,” Louis said as the fifth spell had little effect. His voice was full of affection, of understanding, she couldn’t stand it. She looked at him; his dirt lined face as he tried to pull his expression into one of unconcern. She remembered him, all those months before as he had dropped into a chair in front of her with the relaxed air of a passing Prince, despite their conditions, but it was his eyes that had caught her, it had been a long time since anyone had looked at her with anything approaching compassion.

_“Your screaming,” he began, apropos of nothing, “you should start practising Occlumency.”_

“No,” Hermione choked out on a watery sob, her hands fisting into his ruined shirt. “No, you don’t get to fucking die on me, not like this, not after you helped drag me here.”

“Hermione,” Louis tried again, his eyes pained but Hermione couldn’t stop herself, it had been so long since she was this angry, this terrified, and she had no way to harness it.

_“It helps with some of the darker thoughts,” he explained looking at her intently._

“No! Don’t you fucking dare! Do you fucking hear me?” she screeched, her vocal cords cracking in response to the intensity and volume. Her fingers clawed, and Hermione grit her teeth as tears streamed down her face.

_“I could help you.”_

“Please, please, please, please,” Hermione continued in a murmur as she brushed the dark hair from his face. She could hear footsteps approaching them, and Louis jostled underneath her, silently encouraging her to hide, but Hermione refused to go anywhere, she couldn’t have moved if she tried. Instead, she twisted her head, her body remaining protectively over Louis’ as she came face to face with Harry Potter.

He looked older than she remembered, by more than the years that had passed. Hermione’s eyes scanned him slowly, her languid movements masking the trepidation she felt. She catalogued a few of the obvious differences, keeping her mind to dispassionate observations, he had been moved up in the corps, three ranks if she remembered the numbers on his shoulders correctly. Hermione wondered if there had been celebrations each time, she wondered how much she had missed, so much for being detached, her mind whispered. As the cold of the forest floor bit into her knees she cocked her head, Harry looked slightly taller. His eyes were red rimmed, and he had a gash across his cheek. Hermione’s fingered prickled, so natural was the need to pull the cut to a close she had almost cast an appropriate charm from muscle memory alone.

They locked eyes with each other for a moment, and Hermione felt all of the breath within her body leave her in a rush. Harry was here, in front of her, really there, with no walls or bars in between them. Looking at her.

“Hermione,” he began, and it was already too much, her chest felt as if it was being cut open she looked down and dug her hands into the earth. She hadn't been sure she would ever hear him say her name again, certainly not with so much emotion. Hermione didn’t believe herself capable of hyperbolic emotions anymore so when she felt the lancing pain zip through her limbs she was almost sure she would die from it.

She looked up at him again, her eyes swimming with unshed tears as if her body was protecting her from the agony of seeing him clearly.

“Hermione, come with me,” Harry bade, no, commanded, though he kept his distance. Even as his hand stretched towards her with a hint of desperation his feet remained planted on the floor. Through fear? Hermione wondered, or was he just unprepared to come to the middle ground. Hermione couldn’t decide if Harry’s tone sounded more like he was talking to a frightened child or a dangerous dog. She couldn’t decide which one she deserved more.

Louis shivered beneath her and Hermione pressed her hand against one of the wounds on his chest without taking her watery eyes off Harry. She had looked at Ade Selwyn the way her friend was looking at her now, a strange mix of pity and wariness, never sure which emotion would win the day. Yet, she reminded herself, she had held that man, what was left of him, when he had passed on, even when he had clawed at her body in his last act of fury and madness.

Whether he took Hermione’s silence for hesitation or merely suspected she was mentally deficient, Harry stretched out his fingers again, repeating his command, or was it a plea? Hermione’s head quirked as she regarded his hand, one she had so willingly taken time and time again and at that moment she could do nothing else but mirror his pose. She wasn’t entirely convinced that he was real, she had seen him appearing like this so many times though the spectre of Harry her mind conjured had never spoken before.

Hermione stepped up on shaking legs and reached her own bloody hand out. Her trembling fingers connected with her friend’s skin for the first time in what felt like forever. He was real. So many memories flashed before Hermione’s eyes, times in which they didn’t both look so hollow, then one time when they looked worse, and she snatched her fingers away.

-/-/-/-

_Blood, his blood, red, sticky, and thick with the weight of what she had done… It was everywhere._

_Hermione stood up and instantly slipped, her bare feet skidding on the horribly wet surface. Her throat released a sound she didn’t recognise, an anguished broken noise. Her head fell back against the tiles of their kitchen floor, and as she opened her eyes, she saw him lying there, looking blankly at the ceiling. Even though his still open eyes faced away it felt like they were looking for her, she could feel them boring into the side of her face, could almost hear his voice._

_‘Oh Hermione, what have you done,’ it whispered._

_With shaking fingers Hermione dragged her hand over his face, closing his eyes. The bloody trail across his pale flesh was worse than the expression of nothingness._

_She gave up the idea of getting to her feet; her soles could find no purchase. Instead, Hermione crawled forward, under the table where she had thrown her wand and cast the alarm she had been taught at the Ministry, a unique distress call that would go straight to the Auror corps. When it was done, she pulled her legs towards herself and buried her face. She couldn’t scream, her throat was in ribbons. She couldn’t look up, he was there, Ron was there, and he couldn’t look back at her._

_There was noise a while later, people screaming her name but Hermione couldn’t fully register where it was coming from, and then suddenly Harry was there, climbing under her table. Her friend. He reached for her and pushed her matted hair off her face so he could see her eyes and then held her hand, tightly. Hermione felt safe; she hadn't felt safe for so long._

_“It's okay, Hermione you are going to be okay… did you see who did it? What happened… are you hurt?”_

_Hermione leant forward; she couldn’t say much, her throat was bruised on the outside and cut to pieces from screaming on the inside._

_“Harry,” she whispered on a choked sob, “It was me.”_

_Her hand fell to the floor like a stone._

-/-/-/-

“Hermione, you have to come.”

Harry’s words pulled her from her own head, wrenching Hermione from all of the darkness she had long tried to suppress. She had been so deep in the memory that she instinctively looked down to check her hands, when she saw the blood she took a step back, bile climbing her throat until a hand grabbed the back of her leg and Louis caught her attention. Harry’s words had been enough to pull her out, but Louis had ensured that she landed on both feet. The action helped to settle her stomach, and she panted for a moment, enough to get her breath back, through the prone Death Eater never let her go.

In the interlude they were no longer the only ones on their side of the clearing, Hermione hadn’t realised as she stood face to face with her friend how the rest of the battle had moved away from them. She imagined that it had probably been done with intent, but it didn’t seem important right now. Evander crept forward, his face still contorted with avenging fury, his wand was raised high, level with his shoulder. He wasn’t alone.

Hermione noticed that despite his almost maniacal glee Rabastan looked no different when in a combat situation than when he was enjoying a cup of tea, she wondered briefly what that meant about the man. Rabastan eyed Harry with such scorn Hermione was momentarily transported back to a time when she had seen these men fight before, a time when she would have been on a different side.

“Do you honestly think we’ll let you fucking take her?” Rabastan spat, “You might be the-boy-who-lived Potter, but you're still a fucking moron.”

A few insults were traded that Hermione paid no mind to, her eyes fell back to Evander, his wand was still raised but he, unlike Rabastan, only had eyes for her. His gaze was so intense it almost hurt to continue looking at him though Hermione couldn’t look away. Evander’s eyes pointedly dropped to the bangle he had placed on her wrist and Hermione tensed her hand into a fist so she could feel it pressing against her pulse point. This time when Harry spoke she found her voice.

“You have to come Hermione.”

“I can’t.”

Harry started at that; he hadn’t heard her speak, not a single word since the night he had found her covered in their friend’s blood. His confusion lasted only a moment. “What do you mean you can’t?” he seethed, “After everything, you're here with them! This isn’t you.”

“Who am I?” Hermione asked, instinctively moving to tug on a piece of hair that was no longer bouncing at her shoulders.

Harry stepped forward, but he paused again when he looked into Hermione’s empty gaze, his own eyes shuttered. “Look, I know things… you were affected, I see that now, but we can sort it out, take you to the hospital you will be fine again.”

Louis gurgled underneath her and Hermione fell back down, he looked pale, too pale, but some of the flesh on his chest appeared to be knitting back together. Hermione felt some of the sickness in her stomach subside; it wasn't enough, he needed to get out of here.

“Are you?” she enquired softly to the man still on the ground, not sure if he would be able to speak.

“I’m,” Louis winced as his chest inflated with his next breath, “It’s… it's okay I think, just sore.”

“Hermione, stop it,” Harry shouted, his face twisted into a grimace as he watched her movements, “they’re monsters, Hermione, you need to come with now.”

Hermione looked up at her friend; Harry had held up his wand though it wasn’t clear who he was aiming it at. She pressed a kiss to Louis’ cheek and murmured at him to keep still.

Once she got to her feet Hermione made to take a step forward, but Evander reached for her, his familiar cold hand folding tightly around her wrist, his grip pushed the bracelet into her flesh.

“Take it slow,” he whispered into her ear, and Hermione relaxed into his touch. When he finally released her, she took a few steps towards Harry and tried to ignore the way her friend’s relieved sag of his shoulders clawed at her chest.

“You look good Harry, you’ve grown up like I thought you would, back when we were kids,” she said softly. He did. He looked so much more so than just older, though the years had not been kind to him Harry had grown into himself.

Harry fixed her with a hard stare, “Well, you look terrible,” he replied, but his voice was laced with something so near their former comradery Hermione almost fell to her knees.

She nodded, she wasn’t sure if she agreed, not wholly, but to someone who knew her before Hermione imagined her appearance would be startling. “I know, I look better than I did though.”

Hermione turned then to look at Evander; he had remained standing back where he was, in line with the others, his boots in front of Louis’ calves. His elegant hands moved in a quiet motion, and he tugged on a small piece of hair in front of his ear as he stared at her. His eyes smiled though his mouth remained unmoved, his show of emotion wasn’t for anyone else but her. He apparently agreed with her assessment of her appearance.

When Hermione looked back at Harry his face was tinged a furious red, his eyes darted between her and the silent Death Eaters at her back, but eventually, he stepped forward, blocking out their presence.

“You didn’t speak, not at all,” he accused, “I came to see you, and you were silent, you didn't speak.”

Hermione took a single step back. They couldn’t stand like this forever, the battle was continuing to rage around them, and they needed to move. She raised her head and looked at Harry in the eyes; it was now or never, she had to face this, there would never be another opportunity.

“Nor did you,” the words fell from Hermione’s lips easily, she had spent so much time wondering about whether she should have said something, but at the time it had always seemed so difficult. It was amazing really, how simple words could change so much, and how the lack of them could do the same.

Harry’s head snapped up. “What?!” he cried as he looked at her in total bafflement.

“You didn't say anything either,” Hermione clarified again, her tone was neutral, there was no accusation, all that was left were facts.

“I don’t know what you-”

“I came to your house, do you remember?” Hermione pressed gently, “You, Ginny, and her mother all sat around the table while my arm was in a sling. ‘Oh, Hermione, you were always such a clumsy thing’.”

Hermione didn’t recognise her voice, and she wet her lips as she drew her coat closer around her. “He broke it,” she continued finally, “he broke it because I made him hate me.”

“It was an accident,” Harry defended instantly, without even thinking, just like he always had.

“Did you believe that Harry?” Hermione questioned lightly, and his eyes dropped to the floor.

“He wasn’t a bad person.”

It was as close to an admission as she would ever get.

“I know,” Hermione agreed because she did. She had loved Ron, loved him far more than Harry had ever understood. They had argued, they had seemed ill suited to the rest of the world, but they would have made it, could have if it wasn’t for those last few years at school. They had become so dependent on each other, so sure that the other one could save them from the murky waters that were slowly closing in. In the end, their combined weight meant that both of them were set to drown.

Harry would never understand what the realisation of what she had done felt like. In one swift movement, one moment of total loss of control she had snuffed out the only person in the world that even vaguely understood how much she was sinking. For all, he had faced Harry was an idealist, for all that he could be an insensitive bastard Ron had always understood pain. Their kiss in the Chamber, the day of the final battle had been the beginning of the end, that one soft press of lips had bound them together, tied them to this grisly fate.

“We couldn't cope,” Hermione breathed out, her confession laid out in response to Harry’s.

_I do not deny the blood on my hands, for even though I clean and clean and clean, the stains never leave._

Harry’s face looked paler than Hermione had ever seen it before, he stared at her with wide eyes as he fisted his hands. “You need to come back,” he said, as he tore at his unruly hair. “I lost Ron; I can’t lose you too,” Harry’s voice was pleading, but Hermione couldn’t relent, not now. She would never know what she would have said back then if he had been willing to listen. But she knew what she needed to say now.

“She’s gone, Harry. I killed her the day I killed him.”

Harry’s shoulders slumped, and Hermione knew he understood, whatever creature he saw before him, whether he thought of her as a murderer, a traitor, or an empty shell Harry needed to figure out that the raw materials of what she was were never going to piece together in the same way. His bossy bookish friend with a quick temper and a penchant for the moral high ground was gone.

“She isn’t coming back.”

They were quiet. Harry looked as if his world was ending and Hermione hated that his expression was so familiar. Bonded through loss and heartache that’s what they had been to each other. She told herself that he had a family, a whole plethora of people that would come to his side. The same people that had stood by and watched her and Ron fall apart.

Situations never got as bad as theirs had without warning. There had been signs, ample signs that would have shown what would happen if only anyone had bothered to look. Hermione had been in too deep to recognise how obvious it must have been; she had been too intent on keeping her head above water. Now, looking back with eyes not clouded by hurt or anger she could see the crushing inevitability of all of it. She and Ron had been caging around each other for months, just waiting for someone to light the touch paper. In the end, with what they had both been through, either one of them could have ended up dead. They were both too quick with their mouths, their wands, their hands. Hurting each other had become the only way either of them could feel.

But Hermione, the old and the new versions of herself converged into one understanding. If she had laid, broken and bloody on the kitchen floor, Harry and the world around him, would never have been mute, and Ron would never have been in Azkaban.

In the silence, Rabastan had used up what passed for his patience and raised his wand directly towards Harry. “Rab,” Evander chastised, though Hermione barely heard it the warning it was spoken so quietly. He didn’t move to intervene, he probably agreed with the other man’s actions.

With more calm than she felt Hermione raised her wand, pointing at Rabastan who frowned at her. “No,” he barked, but she ignored his ire.

“It’s not your call,” she replied, though it was certainly not hers. In a quick movement, Hermione disarmed him, though she imagined at least a part of Rabastan must have allowed her to do so. She may have been among their number now, but it didn’t mean she was one of them, or a voice at the table, not that she had ever pushed for one. She had a bargaining chip; she just had to rely on their twisted sense of honour to ensure that it would be enough.

“You owe me Rabastan; I opened those doors.”

“It’s a shitty way to call in debt,” Rabastan murmured before he spat on the ground, the spittle was red coloured, and she wondered if he had lost a tooth.

Harry looked at Rabastan with contempt. Despite his maturation, his emotions were never far from his eyes. “See, you don’t belong with them Hermione,” he demanded.

“I don’t belong with you either,” Hermione said, the words hollowing out her throat. It was a truth, they both knew it, but having it aired between them was a different thing. She imaged Harry had genuinely thought about bringing her home and things returning to normal, and in the way of daydreams, he wouldn’t have considered any of the realities of that choice, how impossible it would have been.

Harry’s face hardened, and Hermione held her breath, she knew he had accepted that she wasn’t coming anymore and that his mind would already be whirring through the ramifications. Harry’s black and white view of the world would never change if you were not his friend you were his enemy.

“I can’t just let you leave here,” he threatened as he raised his wand.

“You do, or we kill you,” Evander said, interjecting for the first time. His voice was as calm as his face, but Hermione could hear how set he was.

“I’ll find her,” Harry protested hotly, and Hermione wondered if he believed it, whether he would even bother to try.

“You won’t,” Evander asserted as he took a step forward, smoothly securing an arm around Hermione’s waist. Harry followed his movements, his face taking on a tinge of green.

“You can’t ask me to do this,” Harry said with a shake of his head.

_Goodbye, Harry._

“I’m not asking you to do anything,” Hermione replied, her fingers moving to grip the end of her jumper, bracing herself. “I want you to stand back and do absolutely nothing.”

She threw Rabastan’s wand back at him; her point had been made. He caught it with fluid ease and moved to the ground, getting Louis to his feet.

Harry looked at her; his face morphed as if he were trying to reflect astonishment, but he was too tired to commit. “How do you expect me to do that?” he asked.

Hermione looked at her friend, watching how the slight breeze made his unruly hair even more ridiculous. He looked so young standing there, young and broken; it was time for him to rebuild, a new life, one that didn’t include her in ways more than suppressed memories.

Hermione met his eyes for a final time, “You’ve done it before.”

She took two steps back, and Evander closed in around her, his presence was as it ever was, her anchor in her storm. In a swirl of robes, they were gone.


End file.
